There is a table in the corner of a small cafe where The Writer sits. It is a table for two, but one seat always remains empty, waiting.
The table is next to a bookcase. The books there are dusty, but not forgotten. They have earned their dust. The ghosts would agree.
The ghosts often sit in the empty chair, listening. Nodding sympathetically when they’re not nodding off. They understand the dust. Sometimes they draw their names in it.
“It’s not easy,” they whisper. “This writing thing.”
The Writer often responds aloud. “You’re telling me.” Someone at a nearby table will glance over, then quickly look away. A stymied writer is more frightening than ghosts.
The Writer spends a lot of time staring at the books. Dreaming. Worrying. Lost. Frustrated. Wondering how to get there from here.
“Don’t worry about there,” the ghosts will whisper. “Just work on the here.”
The Writer doesn’t always listen to the ghosts. Or trust them. When she doesn’t, the table is just a table like any other, a resting place for coffee that’s just a drink and a laptop that’s just a distraction.
But when she listens – when she hears – the table becomes a place of magic. The coffee is elixer. The computer is a portal. The ghosts drum their fingers and the words dance.
If someone looks over then, into the alchemy, they won’t turn away. They can’t. Instead, they pause, attentive to mystery. Curious, aching to know. Longing for story.
Then The Writer will look up to the bookcase, to the name scribbled in the dust – their own – and smile.
“Not yet,” she will say. “But soon.”
Because The Writer is writing.
Comments
10 responses to “The Table in the Corner”
Lovely, evocative writing – thank you for reminding me why we do what we do.
I wrote a piece the other day, a memoirish bit intended to illustrate how sometimes the writing can be magical. And while I imagined that only the story itself would feel sprinkled with fairie dust, it turned out that my rendering of the tale was also touched.
It doesn’t happen often, at least to me. But when it does, the angels themselves raise their demitasse cups of espresso and cheer me on. And the table of benevolent ghosts comes alive….
Thank you, Stephen. Thank you.
Our dreams as we try to write them, always somehow fall and tumble to the ground from amongst the clouds before becoming spellbinding. But in a way that only a writer can understand, we press on.
“Just work on the here.”
You have no idea how this post speaks to me today. And I’m not even writing. Thank you.
Beautiful sentiment and very true.
I’ve felt this way many times. 🙂
I love the image of the writer sitting somewhere between coffee drinkers and ghosts. I love the dust. I love that you know about the ghosts.
Elixer…
Portal…
Sometimes I have favorite phrases in a post; this time I had favorite words. 🙂
(well, and a favorite paragraph, but it’s because of those words and magic and dance….)
🙂
Beautiful. As always.
Even the ghosts have abandoned the here and now, afraid of the black clouds that hover overhead. Soon, very soon a single ray of light will split the roiling sky and the ghosts and I will dance to the words that shimmer within our reach…..
“A stymied writer is more frightening than ghosts…”
Too true. Especially one that is certainly stymied and even more certainly writing ABOUT ghosts…
Thanks for the encouragement. See you on the other side.