In The Meantime

The clock read 5:19 pm, or rather it would have if he owned a clock. His smartphone told him it was 5:19 pm, as did his computer. He thought of himself as a clock type of person and wondered why he didn’t own one. He bobbed a tea bag up and down a few times in some hot water. Steeping is such an interesting word, he thought. The mug he was using had special significance, but then again most things he chose to keep in his life did. He had done a collaborative project with a local chocolate company during the holidays to spread a little extra cheer to the community, and this mug had come from that company. A bright memory in his mind. A good deed done. He was sat at his computer with a deadline. A deadline that would now come in exactly six hours and forty-one minutes. A deadline for which he had just forty-eight ideas to sift through— none of them great. He had never considered himself a writer so how would he know what the best idea should, would, or could be?

Archibald Adkins was an artist. He had spent a great deal of his life in pursuit of making better and better works, refining his craft, searching for a style he could call all his own. “Archie,” to most people who knew him, had attained mixed results. He was never without a commission but couldn’t seem to reach the level of which he thought himself capable. If Archie was one thing, he was prolific— bewilderingly prolific, some had said. It was true he created a lot of work. In turn, he  very often wondered what the hell everyone else was doing with their time if not chasing their passions. It was also true he had forgone many relationships, and currently any serious attachment at all, in the name of finally reaching this “higher level.” A dream which consumed most of his thoughts. Artists and writers alike will know- that when inspiration strikes, you’re smart to pounce. It comes on without warning and flickers out like the breath of a flame. Archie had tried to find some sort of balance in the past with the spontaneity of his creativity and the commitment to his personal relationships.Those results had been even more mixed than his artistic pursuits. He had decided that, even though it was lonely sometimes, and even though it would be lovely to have someone in those times, he didn’t want to use anyone in the meantime of his “figuring this whole thing out.” He thought himself honest in that way, maybe even a shade noble. Or delusional. So Archie sat there, alone, looking out his window at the lovely view from an apartment he had lucked his way into. He never would have been able to afford the place under normal circumstances; however, the building was scheduled to be demolished and the landlord had offered him one hell of a deal. With only a few short months left in his lease, Archie wondered where the time had gone. He wondered if he had embraced the luck of living in this space. He wondered if he had embraced the luck he had experienced his whole life. He bobbed the bag in his tea a few times more. 

He had recently taken a great interest in the teachings of Bruce Lee, and one of Mr. Lee’s insightful thoughts had been “Defeat in anything is merely temporary. Defeat simply tells me that something is wrong in my doing; it is a path leading to success and truth.” This made a great deal of sense to Archie and was the reason he now sat attempting to write instead of paint. His fingers lay motionless with an inability to conjure the right words. Were this a brush and not a keyboard, he thought, I’d already be done. He had outlined a challenge for himself this year: once a week for the entire year, he would write an original short story. These stories could be anything— fiction, non fiction, poems, fables, interviews— anything. The point was simply to do it and to do it to the best of his ability. This new approach was the culmination of Archie having done a whole lot of work for a whole lot of years. The scale of his art projects had escalated. He even had a hand in building some spaces for artists and had a piece in the collected work of The Getty in LA. Yes, The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California, that Getty. He grinned to himself. Another bright memory. But all of this work had been pounding on the same door which never seemed to open. And so, as Mr. Lee suggested, it was time to try a different approach. So Archie sat, thinking, bobbing his tea, staring down a deadline imposed by no one in the world but himself. 

Mentally rolodexing through all of those not-so-perfect ideas, his fingers remained motionless. He had hand written all forty odd something of them— a practice in which he very much believed. To his mind, the tactility and freedom of putting a pencil to paper was something no computer would ever be able to replicate. His phone, which he had turned over in a feeble attempt to reduce distraction, now said 5:56. He was nearing an hour of sitting, steeping tea, and staring out the window. Another thing Archie had been working on was rushing through things; or perhaps a better way to say that is- he wanted to better savor things. He was a hyper functional human, always with something needing to be done; and if there was nothing to do, he was most likely having an adult beverage. The tea was an attempt at curbing the level of alcohol he had come to routinely imbibe. 

6:00. Okay- he thought, just write something you’re proud of in its prose. It can be about anything. A good writer should be able to make anything interesting right? You believe that about visual artists- that they can create engaging imagery out of anything at all. Why shouldn’t you believe that of writing? It had been forty-two minutes since he sat down to write, a passing of time of which he was acutely aware. His fingers finally found the steps to dance across the keyboard and what they spelled out was a simple story. A story about himself. He wrote about what he was doing in that moment and what he was thinking about at that time. Because, he reasoned, in the end, all he really had was his story. And then he thought, in the end of everything, all anyone ever has is their story. Archibald Adkins was comforted by this thought as he took a sip of cold tea.