Maya pushed away her pen in annoyance. The roll of parchment
before her lay stark and staring. She had been sitting at the table for the
better part of an hour, willing the words to spill out like they did, but they
never came. An assortment of soiled tissues
sprawled out around her as silent witnesses to the alarming quantity of coffee
she had swallowed and spilled in equal measure.
But even the caffeine buzz had failed her today, leaving her
restless and distracted. She drummed her fingers in a sporadic rhythm and
stared ahead, her eyes glossed over, seeing nothing. Somewhere in the distance a stale love ballad
droned on, interspersed with the lifeless chatter of the dilapidated coffee
shop.
Maya shook her head for the umpteenth hour and turned
towards the frosted window. Outside, the empty winter landscape echoed the
quiet desolation of her barren mind. Spring had slipped by stealthily that
year, taking with it as a parting gift the final breath of her creative spirit.
She had tried to reclaim what was rightfully hers but it was too little, too
late. As the months rolled by, the world she knew and loved grew grey and insipid
and execrably uninspiring. The flowers looked moldy, the songbirds were
tone-deaf and the sky had lost its pallor. Growing desperate, she forced upon
herself nights such as these when she would put pen to paper and wait for a
miracle.
So far, it had proved to be an exercise in futility. The
words never came; and even when they did, they were halting and jarred, like
indecipherable human whispers across a disturbed telephone connection. For a
while Maya put on a brave face, struggling to weave magic out of phrases that
did not fit together, till she could no longer ignore the elaborate lie of her
sorry prose, till it became physically nauseating to summon from within words
that had been long since lost to her. Her imagination had locked her out and
she was too dispirited to infiltrate its defences.
To be continued...
