There’s something about a blinking cursor that just drains the will and ambition out of a a man.

Not so with the blank page. The blank page, the tabula rasa; there is your testament to opportunity. 

The blinking cursor, however, is not any indicator of opportunity. The blinking cursor is little more than an impatient little spectator to your failure to write.

To your continued failure to write.

For 7 years. 

7 years after releasing an acclaimed novel, both publicly and academically, there is still nothing. Not merely bad stories, or poorly written drivel. Nothing.

For the first several years, I would spend almost every day looking at that blinking cursor until I began to shy away from it. Now, it is maybe once a month that I commune with the icon, which seems to blink with the irritation of a being which could be doing something more productive if it weren’t aimlessly waiting on me. I still get calls, the occasional interview about what I have coming up next. Initially, people were excited about whatever I claimed to be working on. 

Now it has become a running joke in the media. Worse than that, it has become an OLD running joke in the media. A joke that is so easy and pathetic it isn’t even laughed at anymore, like comments about how vampires sparkle in sunlight now. Something like, “Yeah, Leno will have an original joke ready in time for the next Simon Bolivar novel to come out.” 

I can’t even be angry about it anymore. They mock me, or rather, they are now above mocking me, and yet, the cursor blinks angrily and I have written nothing in 7 years.




All of this is more or less irrelevant. It amounts to so much self-concerned whining, really. 

It isn’t the inability to write that concerns me. I’ve looked into this. I’ve talked to other has-beens like myself.

If only it came down to something as simple as not being able to write. 

Living as a writer, or maybe simply as a person with schizophrenia or some other host of disorders, you grow used to hearing an array of voices. Walking down the street becomes something mentally similar to scanning through the radio stations. 

I walk past a deli and I hear a multitude of voices. Not just… not just some hyper-sensitive “I really hear all of the dialogue that goes on,” crap. I mean, there IS that, if I pay attention, but that’s something anyone can experience. 

What I mean, what I’m talking about here, are the voices that are vaguely attached, as if by some ethereal strand to each thing. To every object, every surface, every detached and abstract moment. 

Every single thing has a voice describing it and narrating it as if it only really existed in the form of spoken word, and that it’s physical and or visual being was just some transient thing that only hinted at the reality of it all. 

Now that you may have some idea of what I’m talking about, imagine that suddenly disappearing. 

Imagine watching the TV on mute. 

Without closed captioning.

You assume it is maybe some flaw in the satellite transmission, that it will come back after a few minutes, but it doesn’t. You mash a few buttons, and the sound doesn’t return, despite the channels changing. 

Maybe you try drugs, or alcohol, or maybe you have some sort of mid-life crisis. Of course, then, for some, there’s always suicide. 

I suppose I tried all of those but the last one. They didn’t help. 

Unless somehow feeling very ill is supposed to help. 



The words stay somehow barricaded behind that blinking little cursor. Changing the channel doesn’t help. 


7 years gone, and the only thing left to wonder is where they have gone? 

When you spend years crippled and overwhelmed by the screams of a million voices, only to suddenly find them carrying you into the public sphere. A place you’ve never been able to exist efficiently because all you can hear are endless streams of words that never seem to connect enough to form anything coherent enough for a person to actually use in a social environment. 

The only thing that CAN be done with the damned things is to put them out into a textual form where they can be caged and harnessed. 

But they don’t just plow for you, nor do they stay comfortably caged. They pull at the reins and drag you somewhere you’d never imagined being. You find yourself hailed for the words that have never fallen silent since the day you realized you heard them, and only once everyone, including yourself, has begun to expect these words to be a docile-enough creature for the purposes of pioneering, your mount dissolves into wisps of punctuation and disjointed letters that form at their best nothing but an onomatopoeia. 

And like that, they are gone. 

Like that the millions of voices go silent, and the words are gone. 

So as I mentioned, I’ve begun to ask myself where the words have gone. I watch children play, and wonder where the words went. I watch TV and wonder where the words went. I look at a stormy landscape and wonder exactly where the words have receded to. 

And that is what I am setting out to find.

I am searching for the words. I aim to find, in no particular order, where the words originally came from, and why they assaulted me as they did, as well as they they have gone to now and how I can get back to them. 

The time I spent with them was miserable for the vast majority, however their absence is worse than their presence, and if for no other reason than to return to some semblance of normalcy, I am determined to find them or to evaporate into the spaces of linguistics as they did. 

Author’s note: This is a weird one. I was definitely struggling with writer’s block around this time (near 2012 I think), I think this piece started out as me simply attempting to create a vignette of an “actual” writer who was struggling with the same block that I was. But I think really, this one mostly just describes my continued struggles with mania and depression. When you are manic, the words come to you so easily (albeit, not always coherently). When that mania/hypomania goes away and stays gone for prolonged periods, it can be as though your entire world loses color, or sound, or some other innate quality you’ve been used to. That said, the “noise” from all of the sensory input when you are manic can become very overwhelming.