Wildflowers

There’s an insanity brewing in him as he watches the steady rhythmic blinking of the cursor on his screen. Blink. Blink. Blink. Blink. Blink. Blink. The more he stares, the more hypnotic it becomes. Dylan wonders if he’ll ever write this story, or if the blinking of the cursor will drive him into insanity like some kind of linguistic Chinese water torture.

Why do ideas have to be like mirages in the desert? Something that seems so real in the distance. Real enough to touch. But as soon as it gets within reach. Poof. It’s gone. And once again, he’s staring at the barren landscape. Nothing for miles and miles.

The pressure he feels isn’t one put on him by a publisher with a deadline. No. He could only dream of getting there with his writing. This is a self-imposed pressure put on by himself and his own mortality. Dylan is only in his thirties, and in a perfect world he’d live another fifty years. But anyone who’s spent a New York minute on this spinning rock could tell it isn’t perfect, and each day was avoiding a thousand different ways to die.

So he stares at the cursor. Blink. Blink. Come on, God. Give me an idea. Anything. Please. But the ideas that come are nothing new. Just regurgitations of stories he’s already written, or stories that were written better by far more talented authors.

A working man sits in a bar drinking beer. Done that.

A father feels insecure. Wow! Real original.

The mob. No.

A gun. No.

A twist. The guy was dead all along. Dear God, No!

Something different, man. Something different, something new. But what’s new? Is anything new? Hasn’t it all been done?

Dylan takes a deep breath as his fingers hover about the keyboard. He’s scanning the letters. The letters. The story is hidden within these letters. It’s a code. A story is simply a code, he thinks. The perfect combination. The perfect sequence of letters into words, words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, paragraphs into pages, and boom! Voila! A masterpiece. A legacy. Something he can pass on to his kids and their kids when he’s grains of sand in a floral patterned clay urn.

He’s no religious man. He’s sure there isn’t anything after death, because ideas and faith stem from electricity in the brain. And once that’s shut off, then there’s nothing. Nothingness, like the days before he was born. Not darkness. Just nothing. But the idea of a book. A hard copy story that was written with his hands, and filled with his ideas. Something that is only his, a selfish manifesto where no one else deserved the credit except for him. Something like that makes him less afraid of death. A lasting legacy.

But he’ll never get there if his fingers don’t start typing. Nothing was ever gained with idle hands, except pressure.

But there’s still nothing there. Not a single word. So he scans his bookshelf filled with great stories, good stories, bad stories, but stories nonetheless. The shelf is filled with writers who wrote, imagine that? Writers who had a dream chased that dream and succeeded.

Dylan still stares at the blinking cursor. Mocking him. Beckoning him.

Come on, write something. Write the story about the drunk in the bar. Sigh. Like that’s never been done. Or better yet, write the one about the misunderstood father who tries his best, but people don’t see that. Eye roll. Wonder who that’s about, eh? How about this? Write about the guy who can’t write. The guy who is so lonely and desperate for companionship that he talks to a blinking cursor on a blank page. But no. That wouldn’t be believable. Would it? Only crazy people do that. Just write something!

So he does. He writes a sentence, then deletes it. Another sentence, then deletes it. He wants to fast-track past all the drafts. All the bad writing that only turns into good writing after hours of editing. He just wants to write it all in one soft, smooth go.

You belong among the Wildflowers. You belong in a boat out at sea.

Why did that pop into my head? He thinks. Then he remembers the Tom Petty documentary that he just watched. Somewhere You Feel Free, he thinks, is the title of it. In that documentary Tom Petty says that the song Wildflowers was the only time in his career where he sat down with his guitar, wrote and played the whole song in one go. Wow! What a masterful piece of writing that is.

Maybe he can write the Wildflowers of short stories or novellas or novels, or whatever his non-existent piece of writing is going to metamorphosize into.

The pressure from his internal deadline is still beating like the thumping of a temple migraine. Thump. Thump.

And it isn’t just coming up with a story. A story with mini-stories placed inside like Russian nesting dolls. It’s trying to figure out the style that will help him expertly weave all these stories together.

Dylan again scans his bookshelf. Cormac McCarthy, Larry McMurtry, Dennis Lehane, Stephen King. Some of his favorite authors. Great stories. Great characters. Writers with a strong understanding of the task at hand. Writers who knew that they had to write, even before a single soul knew their name. Writer’s with their own deadlines.

And like magic, an idea appears inside his head. It’s clear. It’s right there. Please don’t be another mirage, he says to himself. Please, be the real thing. He types. One sentence, into two sentences, into a paragraph. A paragraph into a page. A page into two pages. He’s off to the races now. He’s smiling. This is the drug right here, he thinks. This is the high of all highs.

Then, after a few thousand words, he stops.

He looks it over. As he continues to read what he’s just written, the smile slowly fades from his face and continues downward into a frown. This is garbage.

He highlights all the words. Delete. They’re gone. And again it’s just him and the blinking cursor. Another mirage.

Blink. Blink. Blink.

You belong among the Wildflowers. You belong in a boat out at sea.

Thump. Thump. Thump. The pressure in his head.