Drawing a Blank

Do you ever feel absurdly alone?

I do.

I feel it when I am surrounded by faces possessed by the most beautiful of stories. I will never know them, but I daydream about their possibilities. How outrageous is it to fantasize about the adventures constructed by Hemingway and Austin, when I am at a complete lack of words myself?

Disheveled, I lay in a pile with the others who have been used and discarded. Cornered by coffee stained leaflets and ripped covers, I hide. The tang of the permanent marker is still potent enough that it almost overpowers the must of mothballs in our corner. We are not even worthy of a spot on the dusty shelves, who are just as apathetic about their jobs as the high school students clocking in their volunteer hours. The messily-written construction paper sign above our grave reading “FREE - Please Take” sums up our worth. We are such a burden that those who remove us are doing the thrift store a kindness. Would it not be more dignified to be tossed away, rather than having to endure the repeated rejection of passersby?

Bound from flying, powder white sheets swaddled in the softest of black leathers, I thought I was created for a purpose. I might have been one of many, but we were all worthy long before someone wanted us. I suppose that my inherent worth was traded for the tap of a card when someone met the demands of my price tag.

I thought I had found my merit when Nicholas pulled me from the sparkling plastic crystal display case and made my new home his designer suit jacket pocket. Naively, I was swept up in the allure of his success and the responsibility of being his confidante. I can still smell him, his Indian cardamom and black pepper cologne, once infused in my velvety lining.

During his lunch breaks he would lock his doors and open me up on his desk. We would sit in silence while he was entranced by the potential of my pages. He would never write or draw, only stare. This ritual was as terrifying as is was exciting, because in his hands I was a void waiting to become. Feeling acutely aware of my own hollowness as he gazed into me, I learned to see the emptiness inside his gold plated armour.

No one else could see Nicholas the way I could, until the day that the phone call disturbed us. It became the first of many moments that I wish I could forget. His wife, an ex-lingerie model whom he tried to buy with his fortune, was on the line, weeping. If heartbreak had a sound, she was composing pure despair. She struggled to find the words to explain what had happened, as the first responders in the background wrapped their son in a body bag. He had taken his life.

The life Nicholas had sacrificed his own to provide for.

Something inside Nicholas switched as he doubled over, giving the impression to any spectator that he was in the throes of a heart attack. He slowly got up, dropped his phone to the desk and staggered out. As his silhouette disappeared through his wide open office door, I could tell that this self-made man was on the verge of self destruction.

When he returned the next day, wearing the same suit, which was now unbuttoned and unzipped, he dragged a cardboard box along the ground. He might as well have regressed to living in a cave, because he had lost the ability to stand upright. It was not the greeting I was hoping for after being abandoned, but I forgave him. I could not tell if grief or alcohol was the culprit, but he was so disheveled that his employees looked on in horror, careful to avoid his glazed over and sunken eyes. He threw random office supplies into his box. He paused with a sad exhalation when his phantom hand brushed up against my spine. He tucked me inside his pocket, and I wrapped myself around the curve of his body; the closest I could manage to a hug.

He dragged his cardboard box with him to the bank, like a child who was forced to drag their vandalized bike home in the middle of a rainstorm. Leaving it outside the glass window of the bank, he was oblivious to the raised eyebrows as he approached the ATM. He pulled out a stack of cheques from his jacket pocket and deposited them. With his favourite ball point pen, he scribed his banking information on his wrist. He turned to leave, just as the security guard started to close in.

Collapsing a few blocks away from the bank, he seemingly tried to squish himself into the crack between the sidewalk and a building’s brick wall. What was left of him wanted to disappear. Pulling out the letter opener he mindlessly foraged from his office, he removed me from the refuge of his pocket and began to scrape away the flesh of my inside cover. I bore down as he traced his bank details over and over, until the scars were deep enough to be permanent. We matched. I guess I should not have been surprised by the fact that his finances seemed to flow more naturally than his words ever could.

We spent weeks together as I watched his skin grow leathery and his hair, matted. He gained a winter coat and a pair of mittens but lost what was left of his agency. He would confide in me as passersby pretended he was invisible. I suppose his mutterings to a little black book did not leave him in the favour of many strangers. It was through his collection of incoherent sentences that I eventually came to learn his story.

Growing up, the government’s child benefit was the family's main source of income. Nicholas had seven siblings. They lived in a “shack” on a farm, provided by their father’s boss. The old dairy farmer took pity on the young family, but he did not have the means to offer them more. Since Nicholas was “farm strong”, he won himself a full scholarship as a football star. On his rise to fortune, he quickly lost touch not only with his family, but also with himself. Money became his life, and his real dreams were tucked away. His obsession was only reinforced after he made his first million. He forgot how to love, although he thought a “white picket” family was a worthy pursuit. After marrying his wife and having a baby, the feelings that started to bubble up for his son scared him. He numbed his emotions by working harder. He justified this sacrifice as a way to give his son the life he wished he had growing up. Unsurprisingly, when his wife could not tolerate his coldness and lack of progress in couples therapy, she filed for a divorce, and life started to fall apart.

I came into his life after a recommendation in couples therapy. Journalling was supposed to help him process the hurt he refused to admit aloud. I was supposed to be his vessel, one that allowed him to reconnect with his long forgotten childhood dream of being an artist and poet. During our time together, I had long suspected that I was not the only one he struggled to find the right words with.

Nicholas and his wife blamed his workaholism for the death of their son. His empire came crashing down when he realized that no amount of money could have shielded the most valuable thing in his life, and he was haunted by the thought that it might have precipitated his loss. This seeping guilt contaminated his will to live.

During our time together, I wished that my pages had been black, so that Nicholas may have learned to decorate the darkness. It seemed pointless to contain bleached white pages which would be tarnished by the very words I was meant to hold.

Sometimes, imperfect words are more righteous than silence.

Sometimes, the smallest of efforts is all that it takes.

Depriving himself of food, water, shelter and basic hygiene for weeks, Nicholas soon found himself in a body bag similar to that of his son’s. As his body was scraped from the street, I fell out of his pocket. The pavement felt far colder and unforgiving without him. Eventually a pair of hands scooped me up, apparently seeing something worth salvaging; something I no longer could see. Soon, I found myself in the thrift shop’s bin. The coldness had been traded for darkness.

So there I was on another mundane day, languishing as people passed me by.

Unexpectedly, a young man stopped and looked at the bin. After paying his respects to the sign, he dove in. As soon as he saw me, he responded with a grin that grew larger than I thought his face would allow. He snatched me up and held me against his chest. I could feel his heart beating fast through his layers of scraggy clothes. He seemed to float out the door with me, suddenly feeling lighter by being in his presence.

He plunked us down on an empty bench around the corner and pulled out a pencil from his pocket. In his excited haste, he opened me upside down and backwards. It was not as tender a touch as I was used to, and I felt a little nauseated, but still it was nice to be held again. I felt the tingle of graphite skating across my pages as he wrote his name with adolescent abandon. These were not the eloquent words I had once dreamed of, but they had an airy quality that elevated me. He dedicated me and anything that should be written upon my pages to his parents. His mother had been an artist and his father, a poet; I considered this to be a respectable tribute.

He had lost both of his parents in a house fire, so he grew up with the love of his grandmother. They often struggled to "make ends meet". As time passed, he wished he could do more to help her. Even though things were precarious, he chose to see the situation as something to be thankful for, although he did secretly envy his friends when the time came for them to leave home for college.

After finishing this first entry, he flipped through my pages, estimating how much space he had to work with. Eventually, he landed on the letter opener inscription and Nicholas’ bank card. Initially confused, his curiosity soon took over.

He bounded over to the bank machine with me in hand, trying to look as professional as a lanky nineteen year old boy adorned in well worn clothes could. He burst into a fit of laughter when he saw the account balance, and struggled to pull himself together before he drew too much attention our way. Overwhelmed, he took the card back from the machine and tucked it inside me once again. He took his excitement outside and when he was out of sight, he started to dance. He jumped and swung me through the air. It reminded me of the frantic energy of being bound.

I pray that this money will not corrupt him. I wonder if he will be able to maintain who he really is or if the next chapter of his story would plagiarize his predecessor’s. I desperately hope not.

I wish I had the ability to fill my own pages and determine my own story.

I am drawing a blank.