I sat in the back of the car, my parents singing together in the front seat to some weird song on the radio. It was something I'd never heard of, so you know it was old.
Sitting on my lap was my computer. I had a story I needed to write, but I was drawing a blank. The only phrase that kept entering my mind was, 'The bedroom was cold.' Now, this was something of a good starting point for me normally. Usually I could come up with some good lines to follow it with and trail the rabbit hole that the story led me down. But for some reason, that phrase left me stumped.
In frustration, I turned my head to the window, watching the world pass us by in a blur. We were all alone of this deserted road, out in the middle of nowhere. Nothing but grass and trees and powerlines for miles. On one hand it was incredibly boring. On the other, it gave me this strange perspective of how vast the world is and how small we were compared to it.
My attention shifted back to my laptop. Surely I could come up with something clever, I thought. Maybe the story takes place in the middle of winter? I typed out a new line, talking about the harshness of the world outside and the comfort they felt as they wrapped themselves tightly in their blankets.
I was getting strangely bored of what I was writing and decided to backspace the entire thing and start over. I mean, the writing was good and all, but the trail lead nowhere interesting. What, someone laying in bed? How's that supposed to be scary?
Was it horror that I was even trying to write?
I was unsure.
All I knew was I needed to have a story written. One that I felt excited to write. Something twisted. Something I could feel proud of. Something that peeked through the dark abyss of my imagination.
And as we drove on, I noticed something rather peculiar. The sun was nowhere to be seen. I mean, it was the afternoon. The sun would normally be over head, leaving my parents to put down a visor to shield themselves from being blinded. But it wasn't there. There weren't even any shadows around us. Just light. This was uncanny as hell.
My parents paid no mind. They were still up front, singing along to an old song on the radio. A song that I had tuned out a long time ago. A song that was becoming more familiar the more I started really listening to it. This was the same song they'd been singing along to this entire trip, I realized. It's like its playing in a loop.
I gazed down at my computer and saw that the cursor was blinking, the phrase still lingering on the screen, 'The bedroom was cold.'
Didn't I erase that? I had to have, right? I mean, I erased everything else that was on the page. The world I'd created within this story vanishing from existence with just the few taps of a backspace key.
An entire world erased. Fading. Elements disappearing. The world folding in upon itself until there was nothing.
Until all that was left...
Were the words on the page...
Sitting on my lap was my computer. I had a story I needed to write, but I was drawing a blank. The only phrase that kept entering my mind was, 'The bedroom was cold.' Now, this was something of a good starting point for me normally. Usually I could come up with some good lines to follow it with and trail the rabbit hole that the story led me down. But for some reason, that phrase left me stumped.
In frustration, I turned my head to the window, watching the world pass us by in a blur. We were all alone of this deserted road, out in the middle of nowhere. Nothing but grass and trees and powerlines for miles. On one hand it was incredibly boring. On the other, it gave me this strange perspective of how vast the world is and how small we were compared to it.
My attention shifted back to my laptop. Surely I could come up with something clever, I thought. Maybe the story takes place in the middle of winter? I typed out a new line, talking about the harshness of the world outside and the comfort they felt as they wrapped themselves tightly in their blankets.
I was getting strangely bored of what I was writing and decided to backspace the entire thing and start over. I mean, the writing was good and all, but the trail lead nowhere interesting. What, someone laying in bed? How's that supposed to be scary?
Was it horror that I was even trying to write?
I was unsure.
All I knew was I needed to have a story written. One that I felt excited to write. Something twisted. Something I could feel proud of. Something that peeked through the dark abyss of my imagination.
And as we drove on, I noticed something rather peculiar. The sun was nowhere to be seen. I mean, it was the afternoon. The sun would normally be over head, leaving my parents to put down a visor to shield themselves from being blinded. But it wasn't there. There weren't even any shadows around us. Just light. This was uncanny as hell.
My parents paid no mind. They were still up front, singing along to an old song on the radio. A song that I had tuned out a long time ago. A song that was becoming more familiar the more I started really listening to it. This was the same song they'd been singing along to this entire trip, I realized. It's like its playing in a loop.
I gazed down at my computer and saw that the cursor was blinking, the phrase still lingering on the screen, 'The bedroom was cold.'
Didn't I erase that? I had to have, right? I mean, I erased everything else that was on the page. The world I'd created within this story vanishing from existence with just the few taps of a backspace key.
An entire world erased. Fading. Elements disappearing. The world folding in upon itself until there was nothing.
Until all that was left...
Were the words on the page...
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