You can hear the morning trains. The steam from your coffee fogs your glasses. You sit in front of your computer, fingers uselessly hitting the keyboard. The ‘delete’ key has started to fade.

Before you know it, your six o’clock alarm rings and you have to get up. A few more minutes, you tell yourself. Everything’s decided anyway: your outfit, what you’re going to eat for breakfast, the bicycle you’re going to take. You plug your laptop to a charger and switch on the lights. You pull on the same slacks you wore yesterday, a fresh shirt. You do your hair, like always, in a ponytail. You pour muesli into a bowl, splash some milk over it. Five minutes to seven, you’re out the door; it’ll take you half an hour to cycle to work.

The fear isn’t enough, you realise. The fear of routine, boredom. It doesn’t give you any ideas. Everything you write has been done before and even though you know authenticity is a hill you should stop dying on, you can’t help it. Now you’re afraid of another kind of repetition, of how after every fifty words, you press and hold a key, go back to square one.

K told you once to stop trying to be perfect. “Just write something, fix it later.”

As if you didn’t know that. She said the same thing when you took your one finished story and set to work on it. “Plugging away”, she called it that time, “a waste of time”. You told her you were sorry for having high standards, and if she didn’t have anything helpful to say, she should just leave you alone. There are moments, though, when you realise maybe what she said had a grain of truth in it, that it would be easier to give up on that piece. But something else takes over then, a certain dread that settles down in the pit of your stomach, a bigger fear you refuse—

You’ve wanted to write for as long as you can remember. Everyone told you you could, that you were good. You’ve written stuff before, absolute rubbish though they were. You hate these people, these people who read that rubbish and said they were good. Every time they tell you so, you’re filled with a burning resentment. Lie to my face, why don’t you, you think to yourself.

The clacking of the keyboard resonates in your ears, you hear it everywhere now. Clack, clack, clack, write and delete, write and delete. You decide to get a coffee during your break. As you wait in line, you think about how much you can’t bear those pretentious people who sit in cafes waiting to be discovered, those idiots who’ve watched La La Land a few times and now fancy themselves artists who’re willing to go the distance, sacrifice everything. They don’t know what it’s like to sit and do this every single day, the actual work of it, and have nothing good enough. They say they make art, but really they’re only writing sappy romances to feed the masses who have the attention spans of goldfish. K tells you you have too much anger and that you need to get over yourself. You have nothing to say to that. You stare angrily out the window as she scrolls through her phone.

Your self-imposed exile is doing more harm than good, as much as you hate to admit it. You’ve removed yourself from society, in a way. Away from mindless drivel, from the thirty-second song and dance everyone is so taken with. And you’re of proud of yourself for it, you really are. You have better things to do, things you’re actually doing now since you have no distractions. You keep telling yourself that and pretend you don’t always feel somehow out of the loop now, invisible, on the margins of every conversation. But it’s not my fault, you tell yourself as you try your hand and fail miserably at watercolour painting (you needed a change of pace), that people these days have no conversation beyond what’s there on a stupid screen. They’re the ones who can’t hold a conversation for five minutes before taking out their phones and tapping away on them.

It’s three in the morning again. When you wake, you hear the keys before you even begin typing. The dread comes back, and this time, there’s no stopping it. Thoughts rush through your brain as fast as the morning trains outside. You ignore most of them, but not the most important one. It’s finally time for the reckoning. The thought sits in bold type, in the largest font size in your mind’s eye, impossible to push away. Maybe this isn’t for you, it tells you, maybe just do something more useful with yourself, eh? Instead of doing this every day, making yourself and everyone else miserable. Make peace with the fact that you do not have it, talent, genius, whatever.

​

It’s too much. You start typing away so the sound of the keys will fill the silence, drown it out. The pain is agonising, it feels like your fingers are slowly disintegrating, they’re going numb. It’s fine if you delete, you tell yourself, just keep typing. This time, though, to your surprise and ours it doesn’t stop. You miss lunch. Tears are running down your tired eyes, burning. You’re writing something again. You are writing and you do not stop. You are at fever pitch, you cannot possibly stop now.

When you finally look up, you have nine hundred something words in front of you. You’ve finally made something, and it’s taken everything out of you. You don’t kid yourself that it’s art. It’s supposed to be a critique, you tell yourself, of those stupid pretentious artists. It may not be good, but it’s a start. You’re breathing heavily, tears sting your eyes, which can barely see anything now. Your hands cramp, you arms fall limp. With what little energy you have, you hit ‘submit’.