Writer Gothic

caffeinewitchcraft:

-You discover a new document in your “completed” folder. It’s 20k words of fantasy and adventure. You have no memory of writing it.

– You take a sip of your coffee and set it down to type. After a moment, you take another sip only to find the cup empty. You have written ten words.

– You go to take a shower and discover writing on your skin. Dialogue, character description, tips for edits. You don’t remember bringing pen to flesh.

– The cursor blinks at you. You blink back. Time stretches as you blink, back and forth, back and forth until, at last, you both stop blinking entirely. Nothing gets written.

– The same word appears three times in the same paragraph. You edit them out, only to find them, again, three paragraphs down. You close your laptop and decide to go shopping. You stare at the word flashing by on the way to the store. You feel followed.

– Your pen carves vicious corrections onto a printed copy of your story. Later, you will not remember the way you grit your teeth while editing or why calling a character effervescent is “superfluous.”

– There are words scrawled on receipts, on post its, on torn out scraps of paper all over your room. You recognize your handwriting on most of them and choose to ignore those bits in handwriting you do not.

– Your mom asks about your day. You do not know how to explain the exhaustion in your bones or the way your neck aches with the weight of eyes you’d tried to leave on the page  or the way your fingers are still typing phantom words against your thighs. You tell her nothing happened.

– Your roommates are concerned. You have not spoken in days. You wonder who it was you were whispering to last night as you scratched out another outline at the kitchen table.

– Your computer screen goes dark while you stare at your last sentence, trying to think of where to go next. You did not know that your lips could curl like that or your eyes could look so black.