Exit Interview

I tried to make a joke out of writer’s block, but the brick did not appreciate the bit.

It just stood there in the doorway with its smug red face, waiting for me to call it metaphor. I gave it the dignity of a name. I said, here is my process. Here is my resistance. Here is a very expensive way of admitting I have nothing to say.

Then it hit me anyway.

Even the quality of my futility has finally lost its charm.

The grand gestures are cheap. The little rituals are worse. I light the candle, open the document, arrange my ruin into clean margins, and wait for the part where suffering becomes useful. Nothing arrives.

Not revelation. Not rage. No bang. No whimper.

I am too far gone now even for that.

I keep reaching for the old romance of it. The beautiful failure. The noble silence. The tortured little myth of someone too full of feeling to make anything clean in a world so entirely soiled.