I did not write today

I did not write today. How could I? The happy stories have all been written and the vagaries of life, increasingly, have a sameness to them. There are no mountains or seas left to escape to. Strangers no longer smile in jest; they just walk past, their drooping shoulders burdened, their barren eyes hoping to finally sleep a night.

The newspaper guy duly deposits more noise at my doorstep while I stay under my quilt inside, too afraid of what it might carry, too sick from a permanent throbbing sense of foreboding. But it has all been written about. So I did not write today.

There is fatigue from the empty discourses of a higher purpose, from those shallow expeditions to the sanctified soul. Nothing yields. Causes sprout like weed, causes sprout from weed. They are celebrated in angry songs, loud exhibition and commemorated, before the sober purge begins. The governments crumble under questions and dissent. Dissent tires of itself and questions age into history. There are no answers I can write about.

I did not write today. But everyone else seems to have written. About the crushing lies of their lovers and a longing that is senile from having waited a bit too long. About the white noise of their loneliness that makes them sleep on the bathroom floor of their marble palaces. They have created literature out of everything. From the squalor of the man who scavenges by the sewer to the oddity of rat poison by the artist’s bed.

Who do I write about, they’re all claimed. The dying soldiers, the drunk poets, the sad gentry, the loveless seekers, they’re all taken. I did not write today because literature is born from art. And art out of passion. My passion is spent. 

I did not write today. I don’t know when I will.