An Unwritten Story

The clacking of the typewriter stopped and the man found himself frightfully alone. For as long as he could remember the tick-tick-tick of the keys had always been there. That noise was as familiar as the sound of blood rushing through his ears or the beating of his heart within his chest and the familiarity had rendered the keys almost soundless. Now their absence, their unforeseen passing into silence, felt like a tear in the seal of his mind ripping his thoughts through the hole like air through a vacuum.
-
The author stood up from his desk a bit drunker than he had expected to be. He shuffled socked feet across the wooden floor of the hallway and left the bathroom door wide open as he sat down to pee. He chuckled listlessly at himself for having gotten so drunk so early, and worked to stir up the memory of the last time that he had done so. It had been years. As a young man he had always preferred to drink during the day - collapsing with the setting sun - rather than stealing his way through the late hours of the night like his peers. Now he was old, and being drunk by two in the afternoon was a taboo which he rarely found himself willing to break.

He tried to think where his latest story would go. He tried to draw the plot within his mind, tried to follow its twists and turns to whatever end the story willed itself, but the haze was thick over his thoughts. It was the morning fog which keeps the tops of mountains from floating away - heavy, so damn heavy.
-
His friend had helped him to a chair while he fought with every inhale for a full breath of air. He lost this fight for roughly ten minutes, only able to draw in sharp, desperate gulps, until, in that most human of ways, he began to adjust to the strange silence. As his body settled and he overcame his panic, the absence of the typewriter became a nectar which washed over his awareness. What he had thought was an absence - a lacking - became the ambrosia which tempted him towards bliss. Rather than the disappearance having thrust him into darkness, it seemed as though the sound had been the darkness and with its departure the light had flooded back in. His mind was the clarity of freshly cleaned glass, and what he had once thought had been a fault of his eyes was revealed as a newly cleared smudge.

With his fresh eyes he looked around, and suddenly, where there had been but a single path set out before him, he found an overwhelmingly intricate web. An endless number of crossroads, and a number of decisions which seemed far too enormous for one man to make.

His friend glanced at him cautiously and asked, “Well, where shall we go?”

He vomited on the ground, wiped his mouth, and stood up to find his fate.
-
The author snored from atop the toilet seat dreaming of a place he had thought he’d forgotten, while from beyond the veil of sleep, the clacking of typewriter keys sang through the house.