Writer’s block

“Mm... is this it? I’m unable to write a word and I think it has passed me. Is this what people call a writer’s block?”

I said this out loud, slumped on the couch like a discarded napkin. My laptop glowed with judgment from the coffee table, untouched for the past hour except for when I opened and closed Chrome ten times in case a great idea had emailed itself in.

I was in full dramatic monologue mode.

"I think I peaked and died around a decade ago”, I added, for no real reason.

From across the room came a rustle, the sound of a page turning. She was curled up in her corner chair, one leg tucked under her, eyes buried in a thick hardcover novel. The kind with deckled edges and characters who wear cloaks unironically.

She didn’t even look up.

“Write about it,” she said flatly, like she’d just told me to take out the trash.

“About what?” I asked, a little too loud, a little too desperate.

“About the writer’s block. Don’t you think it’s a topic worth writing about?”

She said it so casually, it felt like an insult and a challenge. Like when someone tells you to “just relax” while you're furiously trying to fix a Wi-Fi router.

“Write about the block?” I scoffed. “That’s like a chef serving empty plates and calling it ‘conceptual dining.’”

She raised an eyebrow, finally looking at me, and then went back to her book.

“Still more satisfying than your last short story,” she said, flipping a page.

I gasped, deeply wounded. “That story was experimental.”

“It was ten paragraphs of a man staring at a banana. In silence.”

“It was a metaphor for isolation!”

“It was a fruit.”

There was a long pause. Only the sound of fictional duels and forbidden kisses turning pages in her hands.

I sighed, turned back to the blinking cursor, and typed:

“Writer’s Block is not a lack of words — it’s a traffic jam of them. A pile-up in the brain with no tow truck in sight. Every thought is honking at the other, shouting ‘You first!’ while I, the writer, am stuck in the middle lane sipping lukewarm coffee and pretending I know what I’m doing”

She glanced over, curious. “Is that... new?”

“Sort of,” I said.

She smiled, one of those tiny, smug smiles readers do when they know they’ve won.

“You’re writing.”

I blinked.

Holy plot twist. She was right.

“I hate how you’re always right,” I muttered.

She shrugged. “You picked me.”

I looked at her. My muse who judges me silently while reading fantasy books with dragons on the cover and still somehow wins every argument.

Maybe the writer’s block hadn’t passed. Maybe it was just waiting for someone to annoy me into moving again.

And maybe, just maybe, that was the story all along.