Dead. Lines.

As someone who thought she hated to write my whole life, you'd never know it for the miles of personal writing I've done since a blue-eyed, black-haired, blues-playing, coffee-selling, way older than me (by like, two grades!) wrote in a journal, shared his poetry with me, and impressed me with the fact that he would actually bother writing down something as lame as he had.  (Keep in mind, this was back in the nineties when it was ok to be bad.  We were; after all, coming off out hair-band obsession where we  confused tonguing the air with musical lyricism.)

It was an epiphany.  I could write.

No.

I could write BADLY!!!

And it wouldn't matter because nobody had to read it!  I was liberated!  This boy (who made it into my yearbook because the superlative was due during the month I was obsessed with him... never even kissed me, the bastard!) -had made it possible for me to write without judgment or guilt or fear!

And so it began.  For the next twenty years, I wrote.  Safely for the most part.

Eventually I got good enough to prefer writing to other forms of testing.  A twenty page paper was no problem for me, as long as there were no blank lines to fill in with a letter or a word...

See, I can write; can physically, mentally, and emotionally write.

That is, unless its fill in the blank... give me say, a court docket, a financial affidavit, an application for something humiliating, and I simply can't do it.  I could write them as a chapter in a book or ace them as answers to an interview, but the lines!  Oh, the dead lines kill me!

I've decided, that this is why they are called dead lines.

They leave me dead.  Like an arrow through the temple dead.  The language jumps around, and I can't figure out how to answer the really hard questions; you know, questions like:

Last Name _____________  First _____________  M.  __"

or  

Date __________ (even if it's already filled in)

The lines are dead.  No heart beat.  No mountains to draw on or diagrams to plot, just dead lines.

I stare. I sit. I look. I pile.  I stack.  I line up my pens.  I clean my glasses.  I try to see what the paper means.  I sweat.  I get nauseous.  I hold my breath.  I'm dead.  Flat lined.  I can't do it.  The paper screams death.

So I look up.
And my writer's block clears up.

I can block-out scenes, create stories, develop characters, sketch plots, analyze literature, stagnate poems, tweet to volley ideas...  Essentially, I can write again.  And this time, not badly (or at least, not as badly.)

I just can't handle a single dead line.

I've been staring at paperwork that has to be done today for the past five hours in a restaurant, -and that's just today.  I avoided the house so I wouldn't clean.  I didn't bring a plug for my computer so I wouldn't write.  I sat in the hard chair and not their couch so I'd wouldn't be comfortable.

I think its time to give up with dead lines for now, otherwise I'll flatline, and I'd rather not do that.  Not when there are so many great ideas floating in my imagination waiting to be written out!  And now?  Home to where the plugs are.  Hey, I can't say I didn't try!