The Blank Page

Every single time Ruby sat down on her small wooden desk, her laptop would show the usual blank page. Opened in front of her, with the cursor blinking on the sheet, indicating the need to finally add the words that would make her story flood the pages.

Every morning she would sit down and try to concentrate, to channel her thoughts into writable constructions. But her ideas seemed to be extracted from her. Just like when she decided to throw away all of her belongings. Her mother used to collect all kinds of things. She would pile them up on the shelves: cups she got for sale, books she would never read, vases she actually found quite fitting, but not beautiful enough to fill them with flowers. Their living room seemed to overflow with forced beauty, making her mother's life seem like a grand performance of living.

Ruby used to collect well enough. The moment she moved away from her family's home, she scattered her many accessories she got throughout her life on the small space her tiny apartment would grant her. Only to notice how crowded she felt. How miserable. Sometimes, chaos was just another word for unhappiness. When she put all of her books in the library, when she gave her decorations to people who actually said they liked it, and when she threw away chipped plates and mugs, it was then that she actually felt like being able to breathe.

Still, it seemed as if with most of her belongings, she also draped her ideas, her words and her feeling of being alive away from herself. As if she stole all creativity, all feelings.

Now, she lived life with an inhuman precision. Only one of each in her household. She would never buy anything new, having her life in clear lines written out in front of her. It was the same precision she wrote her book with.

No matter how huge a story is, surely you can shorten it down to a few pages. But who would? Who would read something like that? Where were all the heavy emotions, where was all the reader engagement? But for Ruby, writing felt like a performance. A lie.

To be truthful, there was probably nothing in her mind to fill the pages with.

What should she write anyway? Her life has been…cool? And the moment it came to her mind, she registered how plain a word cool was, especially to describe a life. Has she not lived enough? Was this the reason she wanted to write about her experiences? To confirm for herself that she has actually been living?

What would you do, if world ended tomorrow? A dude once asked her on a party occasion. They were both drunk and he was probably some kind of interested in her. Ruby only wanted to meet people, though. Everything else just seemed too much for her to feel ready about. Her school time has been busy enough. She wanted to study medicine after all, so she hurried through the exams, granting herself no time to focus on other, mostly un-productive things. Like having fun, as she sometimes thought to herself. She noticed she desperately needed friends when she entered university. So, she just honestly answered that stranger guy, thinking about it for such a long time, the guy had probably forgotten already.

I'd want to experience what I didn't have time to experience beforehand.

Like what? he asked, even though she hoped he wouldn't. Because what did she actually want to experience? To fall in love. But to be heartbroken? To live through stages of happiness. But of grief?

After heartbeats of silence, he answered.

You're a performer, he said. Wanting to live off other lives, because your own is dreading you.

He left her standing there, in the party host's garden. And it struck her until today.

What was her real identity? And was she actually bored of herself? Or was she not herself at all?

Writing was a weird process after all. There was so much trouble in Ruby's head, a real storm of thoughts. But how could she ever bring it down to paper. She wanted to write about sadness, about grief and the bittersweet tender pain of heartbreak. But these feelings was never there inside her. Everybody knew about sadness. About grief. Losing someone was an easy plot to write about. But would it hit the readers just like this? Would it make them feel something Ruby does not identify in her own spirit?

Not that it wasn't there. Ruby felt grief. Even though, she told herself often enough that death could not wreck her. At the same time, she was emotionally detached well enough from her family to fear for something happening to them.

When her mother was sent to the hospital, the shock came like a high wave, almost drowning her in a sickly-sweet mass. Ruby was surprised she was able to cry for her mother at all. As if she was crying for all the stuff she threw away in her home. It was always easier to cry for non-living things.

Ruby never visited her mother. The thought of walking through sick-white floors gave her enough of clinical pseudo-pity. The look of her mother was too much to bear. She didn't owe her after all. She owed only herself.

Where do you feel it? her therapist asked often enough. But feelings were not bodily noticeable. At least not for Ruby. They were a blur of thoughts and impulses to action. To hit somebody, smash their nose with a releasing crack. But she could never say about herself that she actually felt something.

Of course she didn't know how to transmit a feeling on a character.

Her characters became so replaceable, she used to confuse them herself, mixing up their traits and always forgetting to give them dreams and stakes that determine their journey.

Her words were a mere blur of factual descriptions. Like a cause-effect, she put sentences after each other, trying to formulate a real story.

Words became her only refuge, after she ditched her studies. After she was not able to read over medicine at all.

Still, words would not escape her mouth. Either when she met her therapist, or on paper. She would only sit there, her mind a storm of ideas and points she would like to see put on a sheet of paper. But how to make a real sentence out of chaos? Would she ever have enough strength to do that?

You just want to be heard, her ex told her. He was always her most critical judge when it came to work. She was a drop-out of university, though for him it didn’t matter if it was by choice. She didn't want children. She was too sure she would mess them up eventually. She didn't even want a partner, but he was right when saying she wanted to be heard. She bathed in the attention he gave her. Until she didn't.

The day they got married, her mother wasn't there. Ruby didn't even try to imagine her sitting there; she just learned to forget.

To forget how the people she invited could be counted using your two hands only.

Forget how frighteningly big his family was.

Forget why she did all of that.

That night, she felt like a deflated balloon. Tired and weak, still potentially exploding.

But it was their wedding night. As he lifted her dress, calling her his and saying that it must be his right to take her, she finally ran.

Now, she totally forgot how to write. Because every time she wrote, her feeling would bubble up. Like a balloon pressed under water, the moment she would only slightly lift her hand, it would move all its way upwards, with its full intensity, releasing all the energy she used to press it down - for decades.

She was not ready to take the blow of it. Was not ready to let any of her chaotic thoughts come up from the cupboard inside her brain she buried them in.

As the tears came streaming down her face, falling on the brand-new keyboard, she wished they would just carry her feelings right into the heart of her story. Like osmosis, all the pain should just appear on paper. Because, as long as it doesn't, how should somebody even know about the chaos inside her?