THE RESTLESS LETTERS

I’ve been sitting over a blank sheet of paper for a couple of hours now. Trying to come up with an interesting and compelling story. But I haven’t written a single letter in hours. I mean, there would be some letters, even occasionally passing by holding hands together to form a word. Every now and then maybe one more will fly past. And then nothing for a while. It’s like they’re on a merry-go-round, spinning around, but unable to catch each other. Like they’re having fun with their own game of hide-and-seek. As they don’t, and don’t, and don’t want to form sentences together, much less to come up with paragraphs, let alone a nice story.
You see, my letters are disappearing somewhere, and when they reappear, it’s like they don’t want to be friends. They’re standing there, just a little bit apart. Some of them peek around and their eyes wander across the paper like she’s looking for a place to snuggle. The others are hopping back and forth as if something has bitten them, and they are looking for a place to sit. Once they have found a spot than they’re already looking to see where she’ll jump again.
They just refuse to join their hands together and form words, and words into sentences, and sentences into a story… Oh yeah. What am I gonna do with them?
Normally my letters are pretty fidgety. I jump up and down like in alarm, and they report to me, “We are here, please, be so kind and take notice of us”. They want to tell me so much, they are ready to jump into the words and compose sentences. Sometimes they are so frantic and jump over each other that I can’t keep up with how fast they can be. And so we make sentences together. One after another until there are is many of them and I have to tame them. We sit together for long hours, sometimes well past midnight, just to get all the writing done.
How many times have I caught them distracting me from other things just to get my attention, and I’ve started writing.
But not today. They sit stunned on a white sheet of paper and look around in amazement. It’s as if I’ve just woken them up from a long sleep and they haven’t noticed that it’s time to start making stories together. Some of them hide from me, perhaps so I can’t find them and put them into this word or that word. Just when it looks like we’re going to put a sentence together after all, to find that magic thread of a story or a nice line for a poem, they start running away from me or letting the ones that can’t form any words together to stand out.
Why do they do that, what happened to them today? My restless letters.

(12.08.2024)