A Woman's Understanding of Fictional Voids and Sleepless Nights

Sitting at my writing desk at 5:39 am with a glass of ice water and zero hours of sleep in my system. Ready to start my literary day. Firstly, I check my email; no new messages. I double check that I absolutely sent that email to an agent; I had. At 5:42, I refill my water. Later I will have to pee.

My current work is sitting abandoned in a google docs folder as I wait for agents to look it over; so I google writing prompts. I can’t find any good ones, but I am amused by the memes I find. The clock hands tick by as I continue to scroll. Then I google how to be on my computer less. It recommends an expensive typewriter that would take days to deliver. And it suggests writing in a notebook.

So, taking the advice of someone surely wiser than I, the search for a notebook begins. I imagine it as if I were in search of The Holy Grail. I’m one of Arthur’s knights of the Round Table. Not the one who slept with his wife. And I am searching the land for the grail which will lead to acclaim and fortune across the lands.

The quest is shorter than I imagined when I find the pile of notebooks in the corner of my room. Blues on purples on browns on more browns. And suddenly I remember why I do not write in notebooks. I don’t want my writing to be found in the years to come, and because my handwriting resembles a lefthanded therapist taking notes in an earthquake. Sorry to all therapists and lefthaded people affected by the previous metaphor. I'm sure your handwriting is an outlier to the very specific scenario. My handwriting could attempt to be fixed, but that requires lessons. I don’t deal well with authority.

I take a break to eat breakfast and stare wistfully out at the world, contemplating its wideness. Or I’m hunched over my computer watching grown men play video games. I’ll let you decide. At 6:09, when I am finished with my breakfast, I waver on whether or not to drink a mini Coke. It may give me energy, or it might jitter my nerves so much that I die. I decided against it.

I would like two things noted, despite my clear modern vices. One, Byron would have never gotten anything done if he had the internet. The fact I have is a miracle. Two, these modern vices are not the cause of my sleeplessness. The cause of that is poor genetics.

I decide that today, the day when my body is eating itself from the inside. Is the day to break out of my writing slump. If I can’t, I will lie in a pit of sorrow and self-hatred for the rest of the day; I'm sure it’ll be fine.

6:30 strikes by the time my tea is brewed, steeped, cooled down and drinkable. After sitting down, my father promptly removes me from his desk because he “needs to use it” and I “have my own desk”. Both things that are factually true but emotionally false.

Then, in search of company once more, I find my mother getting ready for work. I ramble to her about how comedic writers of a certain era were so affected by the Holocaust and how that brought about a revival of dark humor, but only after the fifties because the fifties were a created period of bliss caused by serious post-war efforts for the middle class. After 20 minutes of this, she gently shoves me into my room.

I have a glass of lemonade at 11:00 AM. The nap forced upon me ran longer than anyone expected it to and shorter than they wanted it. After lunch and another game of; did she contemplate life or did she disassociate? I begin writing once more.

Or technically, for the first time, as I have to open a new document. Something I was sure I had done that morning… probably. It takes ten minutes of staring at a blank page and twiddling my pen between my fingers before I come up with something.

“Sitting at my writing desk at 5:39 am with a glass of ice water and zero hours of sleep in my system.”

Now I have discovered a problem. Not with my humor, of course, which is as airtight as always. But with the fact that I have created a loop. Any writing I do now is writing about my day, yet my day is still going on and I am spending it writing about my day. Thus, when my writing catches up to the current moment in time, I can't stop writing if I want to continue detailing my day.

The past slowly consumes the present, like Pacman. Evil Pacman. So I close my computer. But then how is this piece of writing continuing to be written if my computer is closed?

The sudden and abrupt rift in the spacetime continuum sucks me into it. As if I were shoved through a straw. A black plastic, turtle killing straw. Then the straw stops, and I am standing in nothingness.

Nothingness looks surprisingly like the color white, just lots and lots of the color white. Which is intolerable.

Time is unknown, but I want to guess that at 8:00pm a glass of water appears beside me. All I've been doing in the uncountable time I’ve been here is hum Nowhere Man by the Beatles. The water is a welcome friend and refreshment. However, it hasn’t been as bad as I first imagined it would be. In a non-existent void of spacetime, one does not have to worry about space or time.

I lay down on the floor. In the floor? And keep humming my song. It doesn’t echo 'cause space is a construct here. So quietly I can hear myself sing.

“Nowhere man, can you see me at all?”

I have to pee.