What’s Done is Done

Juicy Peppah

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FOR months I have been struggling to come up with another short story. I might have been blessed with a wide expanse of brain hemisphere which catered huge waves of ideas that would last for God knows how long.

However, as I would sit before my laptop, open the word processor and set my fingers on the keyboard, the ideas that have previously pooled in that hemisphere of my brain would suddenly vanish like thin smoke in the high atmosphere.

I would always think it was because my words are boxed and that I was too tired to go digging for more. If compared to food consumption, I always resorted to my overly spoiled leftovers in the refrigerator and would no longer make any effort to pick up a peso bill and invest it for something fresher. So is the idea that my work may no longer be an original one bothered me.

If not writing, I would only sit in front of the bright screen for a couple of hours, enjoying the tension of breaking colored blocks or the beauty of the young man whose only purpose in my computer screen was to help me give life to the debrified ideas in my sleeping mind.

The only saving grace that I had was my constant reading of the worn-out romance novels at home. Doing so made me adopt a question that perfectly suited the struggles I was and still am going through: How can I top my first performance? That question could have been what’s boggling me for more than six months now.

But to hell with those performances! Not all the stories, essays, or poems that I have completed are worthy of reading anyway. In fact, I still have vast blue oceans to swim, thick virgin forests to roam, and wide cloudy skies to soar before I could come up with something really deserving of more than a second reading—maybe analysis or appreciation.

As days pass by, I am starting to realize I didn’t really need a far sight to succeed. I didn’t need a quantum leap to get a plaque. As the adage goes, “A journey to a thousand miles begins with a single step.” If ever time would come I would encounter that kind of struggle again, I would just have to go back to where I first began—thinking—and start writing over again. I didn’t need to replace my ideas over and over if I find them trash-worthy. I just had to leave them for a while and then recycle them by the time I regain my train of thought.

Besides, I see no point in comparing my new creations to the old ones. I realize I am growing older and older each day, spending the rest of my time putting my brain to a more serious action. Naturally, the ideas of yesterday would never compare to those of today… or tomorrow, if ever given another chance to [think and write again].