Numb, yet you go again.
Staring into the monitor, you punch the keyboard and nonsense stretches itself into sentences before your eyes.
“Shit.”
You highlight all and click delete, hopeful the next attempt will be crisp. Poor chap. This isn’t the way Chimamanda constructs her sentences, you think. Then the whispers come, breaking through the air like a whirlwind consummating its place of interest, “Writer, write! You want to be a writer, right? Abi? Write na. Shebi that’s what all writers do.”
But, isn’t writing what you have been doing all along? Why then does it slap back at your face as piles of incoherence splattered across computer screen on some days, or as squeezed balls of papers? Sometimes seven, eight, ten, or even more of these balls.
Perhaps, just perhaps, you are not made for this. Isn’t it high time you consider other things with yourself, instead of writing poorly constructed, hackneyed and boring lines nobody will ever read?
You pace up and down your room, cup in hand, drinking into creativity. But by the time you return to the keyboard, you must have become foggy. This isn’t what writing should be, this isn’t what you were told it is—we are told it is winning always; it is smiling to a chain of emails: “We are thrilled to accept your story for publication.”
Clanging of spoons and plates.
You turn.
Obinna, the trickster, your roomie, feverishly continues to hit spoon on plates while singing in hums.
You would hold him a long stare, hands balling into fists.
Short Obinna. Skin the colour of roasted plantain, puny eyes deeply set above two protruded jaw bones, he has a big nose that makes you wonder sometimes if he wouldn’t choke from the excessive air you imagine he drags in. Maybe, that too, makes him speak in a sing-song manner that pronounces the ‘a’ in your name as ‘air’. You think he is certainly not an image of God. At least, not the ‘wonderfully made’ category. And you know too well this is not meant for an ear other than yours.
Once, he had tricked you and your other roomies, Emeka, Jacob and Iyke into believing the university academic union had embarked on an indefinite, nationwide strike by presenting an old memo dug out from the union’s website. A broad smile sprawled across your face. Thanks to the too-much time you invested into writing, you lagged in your academics; the strike was just timely. Moments later though, Iyke yelped the prank Obinna had played by changing the date.
“Bara, this your concentration no be here o,” he says. “Make you dey try drink water before you run mad say you dey write story.”
That bolsters your fire. Tooth biting into your lower lip, that something in your head thrashes, announcing its waking. Every part of you throbs. And your roving eyes can’t just find the damn start button.
You find it.
You hibernate your computer. Veer out of your chair. And thud your way to Obinna, fractured pieces of a story swarming your bloodstream like venom.
You would swerve him around, and land a punch into his face.
Now, there’s a realized story: frustration fed to an unlucky soul by an unlucky soul dealing with a mailbox swarming with rejections.
ABOUT AUTHOR
Eze Uchenna Edwin is one who is yet to navigate the complexities of his slippery writer-life. Aside writing, he finds peace in acting. He hopes to, someday, be bold and fluid enough to qualify himself as a writer through the telling of hidden and compelling stories, in pen and on screen. If accepted, “Ordeals of a Budding Writer” will be his first ever published work.