The Blank Page

By Steve Cristinzio

 

Kevin is a writer.

Kevin spends a great deal of time crafting stories of all kinds. Everywhere he goes, he carries a notebook with him just in case inspiration strikes. Sometimes his stories are pretty good. Sometimes they aren’t. Though whether a story is good or not never mattered to him. He revels in the joy of creation.

For a long time, his life is simple. He wakes up, goes to school or class or maybe even his job, comes home and unwinds in front of his keyboard. Even if his writing has yet to make much of a splash in a professional sense, he is just happy to be a member of the literary world. It makes him feel important and enables him to smile through his days.

He is content.

Then life suddenly becomes much more real.

At first, the freedom of no longer having to go to school is exciting. Kevin thinks that his life is going to get started as he always imagined it would. He would spend maybe a week or two applying to jobs, nail the interview, and make enough to get by while still having time to hone his craft.

Kevin is a naïve fool.

It takes a whole month before he hears back from a single employer. All they tell him is that his application is no longer being considered. As disheartening as this is, knowing that someone took time out of their day to communicate with him at all makes him feel an indescribable “something”, but a vague feeling isn’t going to pay his rent.

Another month of fruitless searching passes. He ends up getting a part time job as a cashier at a fast-food joint. For the next three months, this is enough for him to at least pretend like he is walking down the path he dreamed of. He goes to work in the morning, and then drags himself through his front door nine hours later and sits down at his computer, ready to type away. But his writing feels different now.

Soon enough, his landlord raises his rent. Kevin has two options: get a raise or get a second job. Asking for a raise nearly gets him fired from his current cashier position, so he decides to find extra work. Kevin ends up landing an overnight custodial job that he performs on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. It pays just barely enough for him to get by.

Over time, Kevin’s writing grows more and more infrequent. Each page he writes has less text on it than the last, and each word carries less meaning.

One Thursday evening when he gets home from his cashier job, he sits down at his computer, opens a new document, and prepares himself to write his sorrows away. But no matter how hard he tries, he can’t write anything. He occasionally writes a sentence, but it’s never good enough. He looks at his pitiful string of words, recognizes its many flaws, and promptly erases it.

Kevin stares at the blank page and feels hot tears slowly carve a path down his cheeks. He buries his face in his hands and wastes away until he finally falls into the cold embrace of nightmare addled sleep.

When Kevin wakes, he finds himself in a completely empty space. There is nothing but an endless expanse of white. No objects, no sound, no shadows, nothing. He shouts through his confusion, but no voice emerges from his throat.

Kevin is alone.

Kevin sits in the empty space for a long while, unsure of what to do. Eventually, he begins thinking of his apartment, and suddenly, his apartment materializes around him. He watches as the walls construct themselves from nothing and all his furniture miraculously pops into existence. It is exactly as he remembered it, but something isn’t right. It’s too good to be real.

Inauthentic.

Kevin decides to investigate first by opening his kitchen cabinets, subsequently finding the same white space. When he imagines what snacks should be inside, they appear just as the walls had.

Kevin has an idea. He imagines a basketball rolling across his apartment floor. Lo and behold, a basketball appears and rolls across the floor. He is the master of this place. Kevin looks at his front door and imagines what could be behind it.

He thinks of a forest teeming with life. There are massive birds and wood elves frolicking about without a care in the world. But then he second guesses himself. Maybe there aren’t wood elves, maybe there are just trees. Or maybe there isn’t a forest. Maybe it’s a desert, or a tundra. He can’t decide on a single location. The infinite possibilities of what could be behind his door fills him with fear and uncertainty, but his curiosity demands he open it.

Slowly, Kevin approaches his door. He grasps the handle, the sweat on his palms loosening his grip. He twists it and pulls it open.
The cosmos lies before him. Endless possibilities of what could be, all existing in the same place. It is indescribable, simultaneously beautiful and horrifying.

Kevin is paralyzed. He doesn’t know what to do. He has the power to shape this strange reality into whatever he wants it to be, and yet wields his power impotently. He tries to create several coherent places to inhabit, but nothing is satisfactory. He creates fantasy worlds, alien planets, his childhood home, and everything in between, but it is never enough. There is no real meaning. It is all surface level.

When all is said and done, Kevin simply wishes to go back to the white space. At least there, he has nothing to worry about. Nothing to fear.

If nothing exists, nothing can hurt him.

So, he sets things back to how they were. Now Kevin sits in the endless white void again. He lies down on nothing and bathes himself in his tears.

Kevin was a writer.

 

Steve Cristinzio from US graduated from Temple University's College of Liberal Arts. He received a BA in English and spends much of his free time immersing himself in fiction, both through the creation of original work and the consumption of countless stories.