I am sitting in a hotel room in DC. The single chair in the room is unexpectedly comfortable. The day's conference is over; tomorrow's is yet to come. I am far from home in an unfamiliar city. Usually I'll read a book or kill time watching a movie on one of the cable channels. Tonight, however, I think about writing.
The light is dim in the hotel room. I turned out both the overhead light and the reading lamp on the table next to me. The only artificial light I allow myself seeps from behind the half closed door of the bathroom, which gives me just enough illumination to see the keys on my portable computer. The sun's dying glow from the un-curtained window offers some meager natural light. For a few moments I stare out the window at the cloud shrouded, lowering sun.
As my eyes adjust the dimness becomes too bright for my sudden purpose. There is still too much light; it's distracting. I take a moment to close the curtains - no. Changing my mind, I shut off the last light in the room instead. There, that is better, I think, although now I strain to see the keys, sometimes striking the same one twice or catching two keys insteasd of just the one I want. I caannot see the screen on the ciomputer at all. the words are a grey smear. As I think about what to write I daydream again.
My fantasy is of myself, reclining in a comfortable chair in my attic writing room. I have a computer keyboard across my lap as I do now, and I am looking out at the night sky and a dark countryside from a fine casement window. It is very dark in the room. My fingers fly across keys I no longer need to see; nor do I truly see the beautiful landscape beyond the window. I am lost in the story I am creating, oblivious to the click and feel of the keys and the hum of the computer. The story that grew within me is being born as I pore out its events and happenings and give life to its characters.
Perhaps this is the beginning of that dream, here in this hotel room. The conditions are right. The sun is gone, and I can imagine that the dark skyline of the city is the countryside view from my attic window. The keyboard characters are invisible in the darkness. I can feel a pregnant pressure from the words within me. I begin to type. At first I go slowly. Although I cannot see the screen I feel confident that there are few mistakes. I am quickly impatient, howevere, and the fingers fly faser tahn i am capable of without causing errors. I know those errors are piling up, a tapestry of mistakes I will have to sort out later. It is only a short burst, however, and the words stop coming.
So. Again. Sitting in a chair in a dark room, keyboard in my lap and a window to look out of. Why won't the words come ... that is the real problem. There is a story inside me. It is magical. The story is about obsession and desire and an unhinging of reality. It is the story I must write, the one that waits to be born inside me.
A boy once started a story (I do not wish to think that the boy was once myself). On a special night, when all the conditions were right, a hideous thing would prowl a small town. Those that faced it (those through accident, disbelief, or stubbornness who failed to tightly shutter their house on that night) died in ways that were inhumanly normal on the surface but supernatural in origin. It was not a great story, but as a young and impressionable child the story's tale of murder made the writer himself uneasy. When he re-read what he had written one weekend night some days later, he was even more unsettled. He had stayed up very late and the house was quiet. His door was closed but the summer night drifted in through an open window. Was tonight one of those special nights when the thing he had imagined in his story might roam? The night was warm, but the boy closed window, tucked the story back into his drawer, and went instantly to sleep. He never finished the story, and never connected the circumstances of its telling with his adult habit of keeping windows closed and locked on warm, breezy nights.
The boy became a man. He knew that special nights were not needed for evil things to walk the night. He read the paper and saw he results of that trampling every morning. He was smart and successful, but always the words within him whispered that it was not enough. He buried those words (like he buried remorse at his long since lost manuscript) and drowned them in day-to-day duties and challenges which fatigued his mind and dulled the words, but could not eliminate their siren sound. There were nights when the pressure could not be denied and he would write feverishly for hours, spilling words in long hand into a spiral notebook. The notebook would then be locked in a drawer, never to be looked at again.
The keyboard waits. The flurry of words subside and come slower and slower. The story of the boy remains unfinished. The words are still there inside. They still call to be written. But their force dwindles. The vision that created them become harder to translate ... harder to deliver from that place inside ... harder to push into fingers waiting to strike keys. Where is that story? Where is the child that cries to be free of the womb and of the construction of a pregnancy long overdue? Why, it is here, in these words. The answer lies not with the story of the boy, but in the story about the story of the boy. These words ... This is my child of words.
It is an imperfect thing, true. It is warped and molded out of my own frailties and failings. Some, upon reading it, will call it deformed and refuse to share its message. Many such children, born of a need that can be weighed down but never destroyed, are born and hidden, never to be seen. But, as deformed, handicapped, and imperfect as it may be ... This child is mine.