Paper

The paper stares at me with menacing whiteness that makes my stomach knot. I love paper when it is filled with my words – joyous thoughts dancing like sugar plum fairies in a small child’s dream. A paper filled with my intellectual sweat is warm and comforting.

I look again at the ugly staring blankness of the paper and scowl back at it. I close my eyes to its unrelenting bareness. Putting my head down on the desk I smell the malodorous smell of spotlessness, feel the bitter coldness of the empty space. Lifting my head I look for a paper already filled with my erudite musings. To fill the vacuousness of my head with thoughts once thought and feelings imagined and recorded.

Searching for elusive inspiration, I come across some brightly coloured paper with my daughter’s childish scrawl in one corner. It says simply “grace”. My frantic search stops with one eloquent word. I had forgotten the grace of the paper. I stopped seeing it as benevolent friend and saw only the ugliness of foe. The paper- it isn’t my enemy. My own feelings of inadequacy are to blame for my creative dehydration and wild imaginings.

Looking again at the beautiful pristine paper and I feel the words bubbling to the surface fighting for life. A deluge of enthralling words cascades across the paper and my creative drought is at an end.

I write therefore I am.