Screen Taker

Must there be takers for us to be givers?  Can one pitch without a catcher? Throw a pass without a receiver to aim toward? Can we give for giving’s sake? What if I give in a take-less world – would anyone hear my effort?

The blank page is a taker – a bottomless well of taking.  Of time, energy, thought – and often if the aforementioned are not in synch … a taker of self-esteem. And yet each day I return. To give a word, a sentence. On a good day, a paragraph or two. In the quiet hour, between work outside the home and home work, my laptop lover and I nestle in a corner for our daily pas de deux. On good days, my Muse and I waltz across the page as two halves of a whole sprinkling the screen with succulent sentences ripe for the reading. One those days, my creative juices hide behind a dam on the keyboard. I’m lucky to get a single, cogent sentence onto the page before It disappears, swallowed up by a vortex of self-reproach. I offer my verbiage to the world, regardless of whether an audience exists.

On any given day, there are never enough words to satiate; there is always more to be said, were I skilled enough to craft the point. And yet I return, daily, to feed the bottomless taker on the screen because that taker feeds me the sustenance I need to live.