A Battle Lost, but Not the War

The vast field of white tormented her. She pursed her lips to a thin faded rose line, and her blue eyes flashed daggers at the computer screen. The single thin line of a cursor had the audacity to blink at her from it's stationary position.

Whenever she was away from the computer, words and ideas flowed through her mind freely, begging to be expressed, written, shouted, sung, exposed for the world to see. Her gasp of a cry to the world to be recognized and heard. She half-heartedly tried to commit them to paper in the traditional hand written format as time allowed, having committed to memory the lesson of a prose heard years ago, that all idea required was a simple note jotted down so as not to be lost forever. But now, there was something in the simplicity of seeing her thoughts in print, neat, concise, and easily edited before being presented that had lulled her into believing the flow of ink onto paper was no longer a sufficient outlet. She had become... a technological snob, and she had not even realized it happened.

Now it seemed the vastness of the white screen, and the incessant blinking of the cursor in it's starting place insisted on making her brain a mirror of itself when she sat down. She sat now trying to remember her last moment of epiphany, the latest story plot she'd thought of, the last political view point she had feverishly debated, her latest inspiration for poetical musing... and she found... a blank. A blank that blinked in time with the cursor... the cursor, a blank begging to be filled in. The blank, taunting her with her inability to sate it's need to race across the screen, hungrily gobbling up empty space and leaving strings of of words in it's wake. If the cursor taunted her, the vast white canvas mocked her, daring her to try to fill up the emptiness when her own thoughts had become empty.

The writer sighed, and clicked on the red x at the top of the window, watching it shrink and disappear, the flickering of the monitor seeming to laugh at her inability to meet the challenge in the split second it took.

No ideas for articles came to mind, no brilliant surge of creativity could muster her vibrant characters to life in the worlds in which they lived. This in spite of the fact that any other time it almost seemed as if those very seem characters crowded out her mind, begging to have their stories told, to have their faces painted the way only her words could. At the computer they fled and hid.

She moved away from the computer desk, and rose from her chair. She pulled out her journal and a black ink pen, and walked to her kitchen, away from the chuckling flicker of the vibrant monitor.

For a moment as she drew her chair closer to the kitchen table, she glanced at the crisp cleanliness of the lined paper, and the beauty of it's evenly spaced lines. There was no incessant blinking here, only a friendly line, patiently waiting to receive whatever she chose to offer it, and the lines filled the blankness. There was no spell check to criticize her with it's garish underline for dyslexic mistakes and grammatical errors. She closed her eyes for a moment, deciding on a simple exercise... to write just her thoughts on the the first thing she laid eyes on. When she opened her eyes, her field of vision reached out and grabbed her target, and she put pen to paper.

Words began to flow from her mind and into the ink like life's blood. She filled the front of the page, and soon the back, followed by the page after. Her thoughts and musings about life in general flooded into the pen, and manifested themselves in black ink. She stopped when she was ready, and did not check her spelling or punctuation. She did not count her words, or worry that she had strayed completely and utterly off her original topic, or that in some places her thoughts had no discernible order to them. She was writing again.

She stood and marched boldly to the computer, clicking on the icon for her word processor. She ignored the chuckling flicker, refusing to be defeated this time. The mocking blank screen came up, and she took a single sentence from her work on paper... and began to type...