The Infinite Starr

There is a strange kind of silence that only writers hear.

It doesn’t sound like silence at all.

It sounds like an empty room where people were laughing five minutes ago.

I never thought I would run out of things to say.

Writers joke about writer’s block the way fishermen joke about rain.

It exists.

Everyone knows someone who has suffered through it.

But for the people whose minds never stop building worlds, it feels impossible.

The stories usually arrive before breakfast.

Characters interrupt showers.

Dialogue appears while brushing your teeth.

Entire endings reveal themselves in the produce aisle because apparently broccoli inspires emotional breakthroughs.

Then…

Nothing.

On an ordinary Thursday the words simply walked away.

No warning.

No goodbye.

I don’t know what JT is doing with Alice anymore.

Michael said something to Pam that felt important yesterday, but today they’ve both gone suspiciously quiet, like actors refusing to come out of their trailers.

I even introduced a new character named Luna.

Wonderful.

Except I have absolutely no idea why she exists.

She showed up carrying something invisible, looked me directly in the eye, smiled, and apparently quit before her first chapter.

That feels unprofessional.

So naturally I decided to paint.

Except…

I couldn’t.

Not because I don’t know how.

Because I didn’t know which wall would eventually deserve the painting.

Most people paint first and hang it later.

I apparently interview the wall before touching a brush.

Who does that?

Apparently… me.

Meanwhile the rest of the planet has completely abandoned civilization.

Someone managed to leave an entire crime scene in the women’s restroom.

Now listen…

We all understand bathrooms involve activities nobody discusses over dinner.

But if another human being accidentally sits in your decisions…

You’ve officially made your problems a community event.

Then came the call that someone had chosen to leave this world.

Morphine.

No accident.

Just silence where a conversation should have been.

Nobody ever tells you how loud those kinds of stories become after they’re over.

Before I had time to process that, I was explaining to a room full of adults that brick columns occasionally move because… astonishingly… dirt moves.

The gate wasn’t haunted.

The earth simply decided it had other plans.

Somehow this required engineers, contractors, lawyers, board members, emails, phone calls, photographs, opinions, meetings, another meeting to discuss the first meeting, and approximately three hundred thousand dollars’ worth of people asking whose fault gravity is this week.

Somewhere in the middle of all that my boss wanted answers.

The attorney wanted documentation.

The engineer blamed communication.

The contractor blamed interpretation.

Everyone wanted someone to point at.

Nobody wanted to point downward.

The ground had been moving the entire time.

Funny how that works.

About then I realized something.

I hadn’t spoken to a genuinely reasonable human being in almost three days.

Not one.

Every conversation felt like someone trying to convince fire that it should stop being hot because it was creating paperwork.

Oddly enough…

The healthiest conversations I had all week were with myself.

Just me.

Talking to… me.

Somewhere between traffic lights and gas stations.

Those are surprisingly productive meetings.

Nobody interrupts.

Nobody forwards emails.

Nobody schedules a follow-up.

Life, I’ve discovered, isn’t nearly as complicated as people insist on making it.

It just keeps getting handed to committees.

Then the dog escaped the crate.

Naturally.

Apparently confinement offended him on a philosophical level.

He celebrated his freedom by eating red paint.

And paintbrushes.

Not chewing them.

Eating them.

Because why simply create abstract art when you can become it?

Then I opened next week’s calendar.

I stared at meeting after meeting after meeting discussing topics that could have comfortably existed inside one email and maybe a polite thumbs-up emoji.

Somewhere there is a tree that sacrificed itself so agendas could exist.

I hope it haunts conference rooms.

Driving home became the final chapter.

Meditation music.

Hands on the wheel.

Windows cracked.

Just me…

And me.

Again.

The funny thing about talking to yourself is eventually one of you starts making sense.

Then…

There he was.

Captain Left Lane.

Driving ten miles under the speed limit in the only lane specifically designed for people who would rather keep moving than contemplate mortality behind a windshield.

Now normally this is where everyone expects the writer to explode.

Road rage.

Horn.

Creative vocabulary.

Maybe a dramatic speech about traffic etiquette.

But something unexpected happened.

I laughed.

Not because he was funny.

Because every person I had encountered that day had become him.

Nobody was actually trying to arrive anywhere.

They were simply occupying the lane that looked most important.

The restroom.

The meetings.

The lawsuits.

The blame.

The phone calls.

The calendars.

The overdose.

The disappearing stories.

The paint-eating dog.

The silent characters.

Even me…

Standing in front of a blank canvas waiting for permission from a wall that had never asked for a painting.

It finally occurred to me that perhaps the words hadn’t abandoned me at all.

Perhaps they were simply refusing to stand in traffic.

Maybe stories don’t disappear.

Maybe they merge into the lane nobody thinks to leave.

Maybe imagination isn’t something that runs out.

Maybe it quietly pulls over and waits for the noise to pass.

Or maybe…

The writer was never the one looking for the story.

Maybe the story had been writing the writer all day long.

And if that’s true…

I’d be careful which part of this you believed was fiction.