a writer who doesn't write

I’m a writer who doesn’t write.

I buy postcards for my friends back home and I never send them. They sit in a pile. Empty, plain, devoid of words. No hint of a message. Not even an “I miss you”, even though I do miss them every day. The postcards are just a collection of places I’ve been, reminders of the moment I thought, Oh, they would like that, the compulsive spending that follows, only to let it sit between the books I stopped reading halfway through.

I open drafts of emails and let the blank screen sit open until I forget the impulse that compelled me to open it in the first place. There are about 135 drafts sitting in my email. A year ago there wasn’t a single one. I don’t delete them, and I dare not send them. They are much too old now, their potential contents have molded, along with the unfinished subject titles. I wouldn’t want to send something spoiled.

My laptop is overrun with empty documents. It’s burdened with these endless empty files to the point it barely functions. I used to believe that the sorry state of my hard drive was to blame for my inability to write. Waiting for the computer to buffer was the perfect cover to ignore the fact that even when it finished, I had nothing to say.

My journal is riddled with empty pages “left on reserve” for the ideas that come to mind. But my pen only rests on the page for about three seconds before it slips with sweat. The sentences I haven’t even written yet couldn’t hope to live up to the image I have vaguely defined in my head. I move on instead of filling the page with something else, in the hope that at some point another me will find the right words.

I am a writer who doesn’t write, who hasn’t written anything in about a year. I don’t only question my ability, but whether I had ever written anything in the first place, or if they were all pieces created in my imagination. I am not content, but I have settled in the discomfort of empty pages, words stuck in my throat, my mouth filled instead with “I wish”, “I could”, “I might”…

As summer turns again, I wonder if this year is just one of many where I will have to grieve another person I could have been.