In the Event of Failure

When you first came here, to this house, you knew you had made it. The house was only accessible to you if you were accepted by the company to be hired into their group, and it was a place to grow in your strengths, a place to discover weaknesses, and a place to learn to move beyond it. You were introduced to five housemates and a house leader, who was a representative of the company itself, and they all smiled at you in welcome, they were all glad to see you, and you were glad to see them. Despite the I’m-new-here awkwardness, you managed to move in easily; you don’t take up that much space. After that, you curved your wings too early and shot downward to land too steeply, and you crashed to the ground like a rolling pigeon, and now you are just a few threads from being cut from the program altogether. But you have one last chance to redeem yourself, and nothing is coming to you.

Writer’s block is such an amazing thing. It keeps you from expressing your ideas, it keeps you from making any progress in your project, it keeps you from doing anything productive. In fact, the only thing it really does is make you sit there with your chin on your fist and your eyes glued to the window for the rest of time. You’re comfortable; there’s your comfy chair at the desk into which you planted yourself when you first stumbled upon this brilliant idea that you wish to write something, the view is rather pretty; there are trees casting short and stubby shadows against patches of grass or dirt or in some cases road. Cars occasionally budge rudely into the picture with their incessant engine noises and enraged drivers. Not that you can hear the engine noises--it’s more like you expect them to be there and so you hear them in your head. A small stream separates the field of grass and trees and strategically placed foliage outside the window from the main highway and more hills of grass and less strategically placed foliage. Obstructing the far right side of the view from the window is a construction worker and his truck but hey--he’s only doing his job, right? Birds fly from tree to tree, singing their silence to you. You can’t hear them through the window, but if you want you can open the window. Nah...too hot outside.

The room itself is fairly well decorated; the wallpaper is some shade of off-white, the floor liners are a dark green. The furniture in the room was selected to match the color combination of the wall and the floor liner; the desk is a dusty white and placed facing a wall adjacent to the window, the chair on which you sit has cushions with a top layer of some leafy green color and a bottom layer of a dark green that somewhat matches the floor liner. The wood for the bookshelves was either painted or stained a wooden green color, and the carpet was woven to look like moss on a forest floor, with little sections of yellow and light blue dotted here and there. An outsider looking in would think you look extremely out of place, or maybe you didn’t get the color coding of the room. Greens and whites, so why are you wearing red and orange? An art director would fume at your choice of clothing if you were essential for a photoshoot in that room.

And the music you hear--you sit in the second floor study, the smallest study in the building. In the floor below you can hear the lingering sounds of your housemate tinkering with the piano. She is successful in some places and sounds as if she might know what she’s doing, but in most cases she just pounds on random combinations of keys and makes up exotic chords and octaves and she makes up her own melody, which she forgets after the first run and makes up a new melody. Another housemate does the same on the opposite end of the building with a flute. The other housemate’s only advantage in the battle of the musicians is that in her case, she has a book from which to play, though she does try out improvisation on occasion, but not for very long and never really to any success.

Why are you up here again? What did you come up here to do? Oh yeah, you wanted to write something. You tear your eyes away from the window and look down to focus on the paper before you. A vertical red line marks a left-hand margin, and horizontal blue lines mark where the writing you plan to do should go. But what is there to write about? What can you possibly write that you won’t feel stupid when you go back later to proofread it? Is there anything interesting going on in your life? Is there anything important, anything you’re nervous about, anything that evokes any sort of emotion on your part? No? Then why do you want to write something? You sit in your chair, going increasingly more uncomfortable as the purpose of your visit to this study comes into question in your own mind. Did you think about what you wanted to write about? No. Did you plan anything out? No. In a burst of living in the moment, you suddenly really wanted to write something, but now that you have the privacy you wanted and the tools necessary, you don’t know what to do with yourself. Maybe you’ll bask in the fact that you managed to get close to productivity. Maybe you’ll write nonsensical drabbles that have little relevance to anything until something comes to you. Maybe you’ll put your chin back on your fist and stare out the window some more. No, too late--you can hear footsteps on the stairs, the soft pat-pat of someone running up to check on you and make sure you haven’t died. They’ll be disappointed with you when they see all this progress you’re not making, how many empty lines you’ve managed to think about filling up. You sit up straight and force yourself to stare at the paper. What are you going to write about? This time, you go so far as to actually pick up your pen and move it to the top line, all the way to the left, right next to the red margin. Wait, if you’re going to write something, shouldn’t it have a title? And don’t titles usually go in the center? No....not always. In less official works they seem more in place if placed at the left indentation, and whatever you could possibly write at this point will be anything but official. The pen falls back to the desk and you turn your gaze back to the window, back to the world outside. In any case, if you’re going to come up with a title first, you’re going to spend a lot more time not writing, just thinking. Half of what gets a person to read what you’ve written is the title, another quarter is the cover, and the other quarter is the synopsis on the back cover, if you're considering a published book. In any case, better get crackin’, because your house leader is almost at the door. Come up with something to tell her, and come up with something quick, because otherwise you’ll never hear the end of it. Step after step, and with each step she’s closer to the realization that you haven’t done a thing since you ventured up to this little room, and the last thing you want to do is give her yet another reason to be disappointed in you.
‘You had such potential,’ she’ll say. ‘When you first came here, I thought this was going to be a successful program for you, because your application gave me the impression that you were smart, you could think for yourself, and you can make yourself do things you would never picture yourself doing.’ You can try to explain it to her, but she most likely won’t understand. You can try to explain that you entered this house thinking this was going to be it, you were going to create something, make something for yourself here, just like she thought you would. But then, once you had settled in and done all the preliminary procedures, you realized that everyone here was better than you at everything, and after that you felt out of place. You felt people had no reason to seek your guidance, and so when they did you ignored them. You felt people had no reason to think you could do what they could, and so when they asked for help or an extra pair of hands you left them alone. You felt people had no reason to respect you or look up to you, and so when they did you scorned them and left them in the mud.

Then you became a mere presence in the house that did not want to be there, you became a wandering idiot who no one helps and no one likes. But when you suddenly one day rose to your feet and declared that you wanted to write something, the house leader looked at everyone and made it happen. She gave you use of the smallest study in the building on the second floor for two days because before you can use any ‘more advanced’ stuff you have to prove that you can actually do something. Two days. The second day is half over, and you have nothing to show for it. Anyone else in the house might have written a page or two, heck, they might have written an entire book by now, but you? No, you sit there with your eyes glued to the glass, staring out at the trees. 

You’re a waste of time and effort, they’ll think. You do nothing but lounge around and mope in your self-declared inferiority. Everyone else just seemed better than you, and so you submitted yourself to that assumption and let them become better than you. You let them improve their skill while you sat at the bottom like a rock in a pond.

Again, you pick up the pen and stare fixedly at the paper. What do you have to write about?
The doorknob turns and you’re too late. You slap the pen to the desk and push the chair away and the legs get stuck against the carpet and you tip backwards and fall with a shriek of surprise and a crash and a muffled crack as your head hits the floor, which is surprisingly hard considering the carpet the covers it. You look up into the face of the house leader as your vision slowly comes back into focus after a few moments of fuzziness. She doesn’t ask if you’re alright, she doesn’t offer her help. She sees the empty paper and the pen right beside it with its ink cartridge completely full and unused. She sees the look of guilt on your face and the shame in your eyes. She sees that you haven’t done a thing since you entered this study, and that’s all she needs to see. With a shake of her head and a sigh, she turns her back on you and leaves and the door is slammed shut. You pull yourself up from the ground and straighten up the chair and sit back down. You pick up the pen. You still have half a day, after all. You’re going to write something, just to prove you can. But at the moment....you can’t really think of anything. You have the pen, you have the paper, but you don’t have a clue what to do and you’re running out of time. So you push the pen tip against the paper a few times and look back out the window. The construction man is gone but his truck is still there. The far highway is crowded with cars. The birds are all out of your sight. The sun is angling itself in such away that the shadows the trees cast on the ground are getting longer and longer, and the next thing you know the shadows are so long they cross the entire window and you can’t see where they end. There are footsteps on the stairs again. The house leader is coming back, come to see if you have done anything new since she last saw you. The chair is no longer comfortable to you, the air in the room is itchy. You don’t want to be there anymore. The bookshelf is there but it’s empty. There are no books on it. What is it for if it doesn’t even hold anything? The desk drawers are empty. The knob turns. You are nothing.