The Writer's Block

A short story by PenName Protection

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The coffee was lukewarm, but she didn’t care. It sat there, untouched, beside the open notebook. The blank pages stared back at her, as if they, too, were waiting for something to happen.

She shifted in the chair, letting her fingers hover over the pen. It was an old one—one of those click pens that ran dry more often than not, but she liked the feel of it, the small click when she twisted it open. It was the sound of possibility.

But tonight, there were no possibilities. No thoughts bubbling up to the surface. Only the weight of the blankness.

She glanced at her phone, half-tempted to reach out to someone. To text, to call, to connect. She had people in her life, or at least she was supposed to. But it didn’t feel real. Not the way it was supposed to. People with their bright screens and their pre-formed words, everyone’s lives curated to the point of sterilization. She didn’t fit into that world. Her words had no place in it.

She looked back at the notebook. It was like staring at the ocean when you didn’t know how to swim. All that space. All that potential.

But what would she say? What was there left to say?

She could hear the voices in her head. “Just write something, anything.” The advice she’d read a thousand times. “It doesn’t have to be good. Simply put it down.”

But it felt like a lie. Every word that didn’t belong to someone who actually knew her, who could understand, felt fake. Hollow. She didn’t need advice from people who didn’t care, who didn’t really listen. She needed someone to look at her words, really look at them, to see her in them the way she saw herself. But those people didn’t exist. Not here, not now.

The pen clicked again, louder this time, almost angrily.

She wrote a line. Then another. Then a few more. But nothing felt right. It was merely a string of words floating on the page, like ghosts waiting for someone to bring them to life. The words were hers, but they weren’t. They didn’t feel grounded, didn’t feel like the life she had been living.

"Writer's block," she muttered, attempting to reassure herself.

The truth of it all was simple and inescapable: if she had real friends, she wouldn’t need the paper. She’d speak her thoughts aloud, unguarded, letting them spill into the world. She’d share her moments, her musings, her fears, her dreams. She’d find herself in the cracks of conversation, in the silence between the sentences. She’d be heard. She’d be seen.

But friends weren’t real. Not the ones who mattered. The ones who listened without judgment, who didn’t simply nod and smile and move on with their day. The kind of friends who knew what you meant even when you didn’t have the words.

But maybe the paper would listen. Maybe the pen would carry the weight of things that were too heavy to say aloud. Maybe it would hold her thoughts for a while, even if they didn’t belong to anyone but her. Maybe she was simply a writer after all. Merely someone who shared thoughts with paper.

She looked at the page. She could leave it blank, but that didn’t seem right, either.

Instead, she wrote one last line: Life shared, but unwritten.

The pen clicked again, as if agreeing. Then the page was still.

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