He thought of it as determination, perseverance and all other high ideals of human endeavour that he still sat opposite his type-writer decades into the age of computers and digital typing, stroking his chin in apparent thought, the rough ends of his overgrown beard reminding him of his current squalor.
And despite burning the mid-night oil for three nights on the bounce, the stimulus to write, to create something beautiful still eluded him. He sought encouragement, sought to extricate clarity from the depths of his cluttered mind, he sought freedom, he sought all that was not forthcoming. It just wasn't meant to be. Probably tomorrow, he thought. A reassessment.
He stepped back for the hundredth time. Where had this left him, It had been a race between a letter of resignation to his boss' desk and a letter of dismissal to his desk. Three days since he won that race, he was losing the one he intended to run.
For the past three months it was the same. The glow in his eyes when he wrote - which swayed scores of class-mates and teachers alike into proclaiming that his was a talent that would ignite the minds of the world - was long gone. He was disillusioned by his corporate life then, longing for the time and energy to write. Several hours of unethical office-desk-day-dreaming had given rise to stories, sub-stories, characters so deep and plots so interwoven with intricacies. But he had to work; work so someone else could become rich, pocket a minute fraction of that man's riches every month and then feel grateful for being given the opportunity to help that someone else becoming richer with little relative personal gain. In the smaller picture though, his pay-check was ample, fat. Almost extravagant.
He felt this occupation choked him, restricted his brilliant mind, felt it was the reason for the lack of days of inspirational free-flowing thoughts and ideas that were so crisply, lucidly, quickly and not to mention, beautifully, converted to words which transcended paper and digital screens to forever make an imprint on the mind and in the life of any fortunate reader; days which were frequent, nearly routine throughout his teenage.
It was puzzling to him that now, with a burgeoning bank balance to comfortably satiate his needs for at least a decade and having taken a life decision to quit all to be able to set sights only on writing to fulfill what he thought was his rightful destiny, he still couldn't put his mind to it.
To quit so soon would be weakness. He had been through all the thoughts several times. A mental reassessment of his decision happened alarmingly frequently, as alarming as that it reassured him each time, that he took the right decision.
So it wore on and wore on, the days, the weeks, the seasons. Layers of dust over his furniture turning to mounds, symbolic and representative of his mind. He went through all his ideas, his ingenious plots. His subtle stories. He re-read his old works, the glowing praise heaped on it. It all seemed so superficial. He was average after all. He could suddenly find no words.
He didn't know quite when it happened. And he would never know. All life was a confusion, in the midst of answering the door-bell to receive ordered food, packed in boxes that constituted a heap in a corner of his "writing room" that he rarely left despite it being a paradise for an assortment of insects and rodents, in the midst of his shaggy hair. Springs came and went, sunlight disconcerted him. The type-writer still lay bare, the imprint of nervous, shaking fingers clear in the dust on each key. Bottles of liquor thrown everywhere, his savings considerably eaten into. It did finally happen one cold winter night.
Two days later, the usual stench emanating from within the closed windows and from behind the drawn blinds due to leftover food seemed to be noticeably accentuated. Neighbourhood gossip about the mad, grizzly man was higher than was usual. Nobody bothered, until a sympathetic writer from across the street called the police in. The door was forced open, the hanging corpse was discovered, the debris was cleared, the report was published, suicide due to fledgling mental health was declared, the house was sold and life went on.
Several years later, the sympathetic writer smiled. A smile fueled by success, and a seemingly endless supply of brilliant stories, sub-stories, characters so deep and plots so interwoven with intricacies from a bundle of sheets, sheets of typewritten paper.