Sunday, 4 February 2018, 9:57PM
Creativity glares at me from her perch in the corner of the room. Every attempt to scratch her chin or stroke her head, results in an angry paw swiping my hand away and a hiss aimed at me. She’s not pleased with me and I don’t blame her. I’ve ignored her all week and now that I’ve decided to sit down and write, she wants nothing to do with me. I am met with creativity’s cold shoulder and aggravation. It hurts.
Leaning back into the wicker chair, I watch her. Her dark, flattened ears and angry pout worsen the blow of her glare, while her tail twitches and flicks against the surface of her perch with loud thuds as I hold her gaze. I can only regret shushing her soft meows as she beckoned me to write, and shaking her off whenever she’d nudged my thighs throughout the week.
I know she misses the late nights bonding over talks of nightingales calling for their mates in verse, and the satisfying drift into sleep as we’d end another journey in the early sunrise. And I know she worries that I’ll forget how trees sing on a windy night, and how the sharp air of an early 6:00AM walk on a cold winter morning could make us feel alive.
And she has every right to worry, because some days it’s a reality.
(originally written for ENGL 224, winter 2018)
Note from the author:
The above text was originally written for a lecture on the Creative Process taught at Concordia University. I took the course during the winter semester of 2018, and was required to fill out a weekly journal about my creative process. At the end of the semester, I transferred the texts over from my university student portal to a handwritten journal, before I could lose my work. They will now live on The Finn Press as a means of giving them a new life beyond the physical binding of a notebook. The texts are by no means perfect and predominantly written hours before the midnight deadline in a tired blur. Do enjoy!
