picture by  csknotts

After a week of procrastination and whinging she finally took me aside and explained that it was perfectly normal to go through periods of doubt over one’s writing ability.

She placed the prompt in front of me and said, “Look, this is a sign. It says, ‘Just Start Writing’ and that’s all you have to do. Write.”

I looked at the image in the prompt and thought it cast an uncanny similarity to my work desk. Though to be truthful mine was a heap messier.

I felt the spark of creativity returning as I recalled the desk of a colleague whose pile of papers and miscellaneous items reached to the top shelf and who reassured us he knew where everything was. One day he was instructed by those above us to clean his desk, as it was potentially a health hazard to those of us working near him.

It was a voyage of discovery for him. Documents long thought lost were recovered, a lunch from sometime in the past, we dared not speculate when, emerged from a collection of Year 9 poems he thought at the time worth saving, in case he might need them sometime in the future. Various office implements, belonging to other staff members were found when thought lost, the manuscript of a novel he was working on saw the light of day when he’d given up on the idea some years before.

By the end of the day, we were confronted with a change to our office landscape we knew would take some getting used to. It was like a bare patch had appeared in the room, and we all immediately thought of ways of covering it up, as the change was far too sudden and revealing. As for my colleague, he sat and stared at the wasteland that was now his workspace, lost and not sure as to what to do with himself.

I showed what I had composed to my erstwhile companion who smiled and said, “There you go slugger, knew you could do it.”

Written for: https://athling2001.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/jsw-prompt-6-18-2018/