`Why don’t you write these days? It has
been a while since you wrote something.`
He did not have a response. He knew he was
guilty. Guilty to her and guilty to himself. There were thousands of stories
within him, hundreds of poems bubbling, waiting to be leashed out and a string
of words that came into his dreams every night, but yet there was something that
was stopping him. Was it the famous writer’s block? Was it inertia and
laziness? Was it distractions that gave him instant gratification without much
effort in comparison to writing which took its own time and effort and the
gratification wasn’t even guaranteed?
Yet, whenever she would ask him innocently on
why he wasn’t writing these days, he felt as if he owed it to her to sit down
and write something. It was even ironic that while he himself was struggling to
write, he kept pushing her to write every now and then and she would oblige by coming
up with the most beautiful stories that were recognizable and relatable to all,
stories that resonated with its readers, stories that stripped the outer layer
of human emotions that were all made up and went deeper. It was as if she had
access to the realms of people that they themselves weren’t aware of, but yet, every
time they would read what she had written, it would leave them with a pang of
pain, a sense of moral dilemma or deep pathos that made them sit back and
reflect.
He was her biggest critic as well as her
biggest admirer. He would read lines and words in her story that would make him
wonder in awe on how she thinks, what brings to the surface such deep lines and
how she surprises him by going one step further in her craft than what he would
think is her limit. Oddly, he would feel
proud that she belonged to him and loved him, that she had the purest heart
which got reflected in her stories, that she wrote on his insistence every time
and yet his writer mind would also feel a tinge of jealousy. He would happily
tell the world that she writes and would urge others to read what she wrote and
yet he would wish that someday his craft would get sharper enough to stand next
to hers. He knew there was some distance to be covered, he knew that her
writing was the spark that he needed every now and then to improve his writing
but what he kept forgetting was that to even come close to her, he had to write
first.
Why don’t you write these days was a question that
she asked him innocently but she didn’t know that it started the rusting
machinery once again.
