The Blank Page

I have contemplated the empty screen for some considerable time. My thoughts swirl restlessly but fail to coalesce, my fingers remain poised in anticipation above the keyboard and the page remains stubbornly blank. I look up at the clock: three minutes have elapsed since I last looked, three minutes that might have been an hour or a day or a week but all filled with...nothing. It seems the harder I will a subject to appear and the inspiration to strike, the further that sweet release recedes. And the page remains blank and, seemingly, getting blanker.

I decide to look at my social media feeds - purely for the purposes of inspiration, you understand - even though I know that this is the worst possible direction to choose. Instead of finding a the piece of grit that I can use to build into a literary pearl, I know I will only find a way to waste a bit of time and avoid the blank sheet for an hour or two longer. Ninety minutes of humorous cat videos and depressing tweets from right-wing nutters later, the guilt finally gets he better of me and I return to the (still) blank page. I look a it a while longer: pristine, virgin, awaiting my words, my wisdom to anoint its snowy field. I sigh and suddenly realise that I really need to make a cup of tea. Perhaps dehydration has been the problem all along! I make the tea, drink it slowly, wash up my cup, straighten the kitchen and take the bin out. As I walk back into the living room, the laptop seems to glower at me. "You're avoiding me!" it chides. "This page isn't going to fill itself you know. You have to write the words!", Shamed by the voices in my head, I touch the mouse to activate the screen. As the brilliant whiteness of the blank page momentarily shocks my eyes, I find that the word pixies have not visited me and filled the page while I procrastinated in the kitchen. Damn!

"Right!" I say with exaggerated force as I stretch my fingers and crack my knuckles over the keyboard, a gesture of resolve that, while it might look and sound good to the casual observer, actually has no effect whatsoever on my creative output over the next thirty minutes. Five times over the course of that painful half hour I type a single word, contemplate it and, finding there is no work that springs to mind to follow it, I backspace it back into the ether from whence it came. Eventually, I close the laptop and admit defeat for the day. All I can hope now is that the evening radio or TV might provide a starting point on tomorrow's blank page or, failing that, I not only dream the contents of the page but I wake up remembering every golden word!

For this evening, however, the page will remain blank and I will thank God that I am only doing this for 'fun' and not working to a deadline where my salary depends upon my timely output. I can live with the blank page better than I can live with a blank current account.