Monday reflections: the lonely life of a writer.
Waking up to the sound of birds singing outside his window, Julian opened his eyes and yawned softly before getting out of bed.
Like every morning, he went into the kitchen and made himself a small breakfast. Then he sat down at the table and opened his laptop.
While eating, he went through his mailbox, scrolled through his social media feed and caught up on the latest news. Eventually, he opened the file he had been working on the night before — the one he had abandoned when inspiration had simply refused to come.
After almost half an hour of rereading the script, he realized that the inspiration still wasn’t there.
So he closed his laptop.
Perhaps staring at the same words for another hour wasn’t going to make them magically write themselves.
Instead, he decided to head into town for a while.
He took his bike and followed the road along the cliffs, the coastline stretching out beside him as he made his way towards the small town he had moved to a couple of years earlier.
There, he parked his bike near the little lighthouse overlooking the coast and went for a short walk to clear his mind.
Not far away, a small fishing boat slowly left the harbor, heading out towards the open sea. Julian stopped for a moment and watched it go.
Further and further.
Until eventually, it became little more than a dot on the horizon.
His thoughts seemed to wander away with it.
For a while, there was no unfinished story. No blinking cursor waiting impatiently for another sentence. No question of what should happen next.
There was only the sea.
He remained there until the boat disappeared from sight. Then he shook his head, waking himself from his daydream, and wandered towards a nearby bar for a coffee.
Late in the afternoon, Julian returned home.
He took his laptop outside and settled into the lounge, opening a new page instead of returning to the one that had frustrated him that morning.
Something had come to him during the day.
A thought.
Perhaps only a sentence at first.
But sentences have a strange habit of becoming paragraphs. And paragraphs, if you leave the door open for them, sometimes become stories.
His fingers began moving across the keyboard.
After a while, he stopped.
Julian leaned back in his chair and looked ahead with dreamy eyes.
The Pyrenees stretched out before him, disappearing into the distance beneath a perfectly blue Spanish sky.
For a moment, he simply sat there.
No traffic.
No meetings.
No one asking when the work would be finished.
Just him, his coffee, and a story that hadn’t existed when he woke up that morning.
A small smirk appeared on his face.
“What a terrible life,” he whispered.
Then he looked back at his screen and continued writing.