I sit staring at the computer screen not knowing what to write. This is my first experience of writer’s block and I do not like it. My mind is as blank as the screen and as dumb as the pointer. Nothing makes sense and the words I try to type don’t connect coherently. My thoughts are random and pointless. It feels as if someone has inflated a balloon inside my head and all my thoughts are stuck behind it, unable to penetrate or go around the rubber wall.
I have read enough articles about writer’s block to recognize the symptoms, and not so long ago I even scoffed, inwardly of course, that it would never happen to me. I would always have something to write about I boasted to myself. But now, after several wordless weeks have passed and my screen is still blank, I have to admit the worst has happened. I scratch my head and every other place that is scratchable but nothing helps and I tug my spectacles from my face in frustration. I might as well pack up and do something else I think to myself.
Picking up the old red, imitation leather glass case, my eyes catch the faded red writing
on the inside flap. I have to squint to make out my sister’s initials, the grade she was in when she had the case, and the initials of the high school she attended. A bit of mental arithmetic and I realize, with a shock, that the case is 45 years old. Suddenly the ‘balloon’ is full of memories and a lot of sadness and longing. She lives on another continent now, and an ocean separates us, but those memories have brought me close to her. Decades suddenly seem like minutes and distance only centimeters. I am reminded of the horror expression on her face one time when I insulted her, and the way she chased two would-be muggers down the road when they assaulted me for a coin I had picked up. I think I was six at the time and she, was five.
Then there was the time a bee stung her and she became catatonic, and the occasion when she slipped in heavy rain on a steep hill and ended up under a car. There was the occasion when, as a six-year-old, she wanted to get something off the top of a wardrobe, and it fell over and trapped her underneath, and then there was the time she desperately wanted to go ice skating but had no skates.
Each incident happened months, even years apart, but time has brought them close together, connecting them into a continuous stream of unforgettable clips, a movie of two lives separate yet joined through the bond of blood. There were all the suggestive sexual comments and notes she received while at the high school where she used the spectacle case, and I remember my determination to protect her. How, I do not know as all the innuendos came from older and bigger boys. Luckily I did not have to front up because she met a boy, her first boyfriend, a freckled, bespectacled excuse for a male who was named after an American car maker. He did not last long.
The last time I saw him was in a jail cell, he was on the wrong side of the door for a traffic violation that had escalated out of proportion due to non-payment and his arrogance. Her next boyfriend was the brother of a Jehovah’s Witness friend. That relationship ended abruptly when they came for a visit one day and ended up in a word war about religion with my Roman Catholic mother who eventually resorted to chasing the Witnesses out of the house with a .22 revolver. The third boyfriend was a policeman in apartheid South Africa who did not like his job very much but preferred it to conscription in the army and a lengthy stint on the country’s border. Her fourth boyfriend became her husband and they were married for more than twenty years before that ended in divorce with him preferring to stay in Africa. I suppose my sister’s PTSD after a tour of duty in Afghanistan did not help their marriage. Then, to top it all, at roughly the same time, her daughter decides that all this divorce trouble was her mother’s fault and moves to New Zealand in a huff, settling in with a free-living cult and refusing to speak to her mother. They are still estranged.
When the divorce finally comes before a magistrate, her husband accuses her of being a lesbian and not allowing him his marital rights. Not a word was said about his philandering and laziness and the fact that she had looked after him for years because of his ‘bad back’ and inability to do any kind of work. Now she bakes and decorates cakes and lives with her son. She is the last of my immediate family still alive and I have not seen her in fifteen years…
Enough reminiscing – time to get back to writing and my dilemma – what can I do while waiting for this to pass? Play Solitaire on my computer or I could go for a walk along the beach, perhaps that artist or the old man with the metal detector I saw the other day will be there, I could try and start up a conversation. Maybe I could do some work in the garden, they tell me there are some old gold coins buried somewhere behind the old house, or I could go look at that house that burnt down last week, some of the residents were badly burnt. Or maybe I should just laze in front of the TV. It doesn’t seem as if anything has happened recently. This writer’s block thing is a drag.
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