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Grab a bottle of whiskey and a pack of smokes. Open your laptop, pull up a new word document, light a cigarette, and pour yourself a glass of whiskey. Start typing whatever comes to mind; first comes the idea, second comes the editing. Frantically type away, the glow from the screen and the embers of the cigarette the only lighting sources around you. You hit a wall, why not listen to some music while you’re at it, maybe Oasis, maybe some Madonna? You have a drink and write. One song goes by, then another song, then you realize you’ve stopped writing and you’ve finished the entire True Blue album. It’s late, you’re tired and a little buzzed. You’ll continue writing tomorrow.

Grab a bottle of wine, a pack of smokes. Open your laptop and return where you left off yesterday. You feel like listening to music again; this time you put on some Bowie. You type “we can be heroes, just for one day.” Stop, delete that, maybe don’t listen to Bowie. You light a cigarette and pour yourself a generous glass of wine as you read over what you’ve written. The hours fly by and you go to pour yourself another glass, but the bottle is empty. You think, I shouldn’t drink as much. I need to get more alcohol.

Grab a bottle of booze, the smokes; open laptop, write. You decide that listening to music isn’t the best when you write. The night goes on; you’ve managed to smoke half a pack of cigarettes and drink half a bottle of scotch. It’s a good night. You stare at your screen, the blue light burning a hole through your retinas. So far you’ve written a story about a spy who’s on his first big mission. He drinks and smokes just like you, yet he’s in impeccable shape and can seduce anyone he wants to—why can’t you? You write him off, kill him in a horrible way, death by a thousand cuts. You pass out.

Whiskey, smokes, laptop, word file. You decide to write a different story today, one that is easier to manage for an amateur. You forgo any glasses and start drinking straight from the bottle; a writer must save as much time as possible. You start to write about a corrupt politician and how their greed becomes their downfall. You decide to watch All the President’s Men for inspiration. You pass out thirty minutes into the movie only to wake up sometime in the morning with your head pressed on the keyboard, drool covering your face.
Today you decide to go out for a walk; maybe some fresh air and sunlight will get you in an inspired mood. You observe the little brown, black, and white birds that flutter on by in groups of 10 or so, the little hops they make as they survey the ground looking for something to snack on, maybe some leftover fries that someone threw out because they went cold before they could eat them; they might be scrounging for some worms or other bugs crawling around. You think to yourself, Can I write something about birds? What if these birds were radioactive and they started to infect everyone, causing a global pandemic—no, a global apocalypse—where the only hope for humanity is to live in massive underwater complexes where the birds won’t be able to reach the rest of civilization. No, of course not, you think. I’m no ornithologist! I don’t know the first thing about how birds work. You deem that idea too silly; you need to come up with something that is serious and important, something that can give you prestige and honour.

Besides those birds, your walk has been most uneventful and, more importantly, most uninspiring. It’s been almost an hour and nothing has piqued your curiosity. Maybe you should go home? You think that, if you were writing a story, it would be at this moment that an absurd event would happen right before your very eyes. Perhaps a man would crash his car into someone’s yard and stumble out, blood gushing from his face as he hobbled down the street, and only a few short seconds would pass before a squadron of cop cars pulled up and surrounded the man, and then he would pull out a gun and yell out something like “You’ll never take me alive!” only to be blasted with bullets, blood gushing from every inch of his body, painting the sidewalk red, squirting out and drenching the cops. But, alas, nothing like that would ever happen to you, so you walk on home, defeated.

Time eludes you as you type away, going from idea to idea. You realize that you’ve been writing for weeks on end without seeing friends or family. People start to worry about you: Are you well? Do you drink too much? When will you pay your rent? You decide you should see people just to let them know you are a-okay. You go to a friend’s party, equipped with a bottle of tequila and your wit. You tell yourself that you won’t drink too much this time.

You arrive at their apartment, the one that’s on the fourteenth floor, the building overlooking the city. The city itself is vibrant and full of life with buildings glowing in a hue of purple, green, and red. Skyscrapers abound, filled with hopeless-romantics, stressed out parents, and burnt out businessmen. Car horns blare; people are pissed at construction sites littered throughout. Everyone is surprised to see you, but they are also happy. You immediately open the tequila and start pouring out shots and handing them to people. As the party goes on you have one drink, which turns into two, which then turns into five. Before you know it, you’re ten drinks down and it’s only been a couple hours. Your friends introduce you to people, but you’re too messed up to realize that they are actually trying to set you up with someone; it has been far too long since you’ve felt the intimate warmth of another person’s touch, let alone since you’ve had sex. You end up saying some pretentious bullshit or make an inappropriate remark to every potential match; your friends are getting irritated with you.

You’ve made your way to the fifteenth and final drink of the night and, as you drink it, you can’t help but be enamoured by the beauty of the skyline. The once vibrant colors of the city are now blurred into one bland and uniform grey. You wonder if the people in those apartments are kings and queens in their lives, or if they’re just jesters. You stumble to the balcony doors, stepping outside, where people are having a smoke. You ignore them and keep your focus on the city ahead of you; the air caresses your skin, leaving you cool and relaxed. You close your eyes and let nature embrace you; you open your arms, ready to embrace mother nature back. You grab hold of the railing, wrapping your fingers around the cold steel. The wind flows through your hair as if it were someone’s fingers. You open your eyes, look down, and notice how high up you are. You then think to yourself, Would anyone miss me? Is this what my purpose in life is? You think your life is going nowhere, so why not let it go somewhere? The people who have been conversing realize what you’re trying to do and pull you away from the edge. They bring you inside and lay you down on your friend’s bed; they enter the room and give you looks of disappointment and worry. You wake up much later, in the wee hours of the morning, when everyone from the party has either left or stayed over and passed out. You leave your friend’s house. You get home and take a cold shower to wake yourself up.

After your shower, you grab a bottle of vodka, a bottle of orange juice, and a couple packs of smokes. You turn on your laptop and open a new word document. You start to write.

– Published in Soliloquies Anthology: https://issuu.com/soliloquiesanthology/docs/slq_final2021_v6