Saturday: a notepad sat on my desk. The paper’s slick surface reflected a curious yellow hue from a lamp. A clear resin pen, filled halfway with a dark grey ink, lay atop the notepad, a conspicuous accessory.
I was up late at night, but the late-night writing did little to help with my insomnia. Rather, it irritated me without end, and soon enough, a pained expression appeared on my face, which resolved itself into a relaxed state only to emerge anew.
Words which I wished to meld together to compose into something descriptive—something elegant—would fall apart before they even reached the outer edges of my consciousness. A feeling of loss would wash over me as I fumbled for words I knew existed but could not produce. And what could I do but move on? My train of thought would long have departed were I to stare at the paper until a particular word came to me. Yet to keep writing, disturbed by the thought of having written something imprecise or plainly inaccurate, was painful.
Whenever the ink from my pen would flow out onto the paper, hovering above like dew on a leaf, I would clumsily move my hand and smear the ink onto what I had already written. Only after would the liquid start to seep into the wood-pulp fibres. My words by then would already have been ruined—forever streaked with an ink smudge. I was too late and it was now impossible to remove.
Now, my hands and the page were stained with ink; IÂ couldn’t convey what I longed to express in the manner I had intended. And there was nothing I could do but resign myself to this reality.
At times, I was tempted to toss that sheet of paper into a fire—out of frustration.
It would be relaxing, perhaps, like in Fahrenheit 451, to watch as the evidence of my chagrin is consumed in merciless immolation. The paper would collapse inward as the flame punctured through its centre. It would exist, then burn away with unseen majesty—to be reborn some other time, with some other art.
Afterward, the dissatisfaction would fade. I would no longer have to be reminded of my work. I could move on and forget about it.
But to see what I wrote eaten, to see it blackened and changed, would be a horror I could not bear.
Was it a pleasure to burn?
Even the crumpled-up, scratched-out blather–ridden papers had somewhere to go—some place where they could be used. And they were nevertheless evidence of a minute part of some greater journey.
To burn them would be tragic.
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