Sunday, 11 February 2018, 10:41PM
The atmosphere weighs down my surroundings like a thick blanket shrouding the night. The light mist of rain soaking the snow with a heaviness, which makes me feel like I’m anchored at the bottom of an ocean, has me gasping for breath. I love it. This thick and heavy cloud, which settles on everyone else with gloom, makes me feel alive, as if a current hums just below the surface of my skin. My thoughts are on the small things I’ve been missing since the move: the mornings waking up to the chatter of dancing chickadees in the tree outside my bedroom window, and the coloured paint covering my bedroom wall.
It’s a silly thing, but the white walls of my new office space don’t stir the same emotions as the muted blue walls of the room I grew up in. I am faced with a blank canvas. A blank page that has me tilting my head to look for a place to start, and Creativity can’t wait. She’s excited, so thrilled she rushes up to the walls eager to get her paws on them, but stops short in fear of starting in the wrong place. Over thinking has her settling on the book shelves with her friends, brushing up against the books and their familiarity. The words, stories, feelings impressed in the walls of my old bedroom remain there, just out of reach and impossible to transfer over.
Focus seems to be the only things we’ve been granted by these white walls.
(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!
