Zyphera

How many sentences, lines or tens of pages he wrote down? As an inexorable urge to carve such an immaterial, fragile, and fleeting thought into the rock. As a bulimia of words. He sees, speaks, thinks, imagines, believes so intensely that he has the overpowering need to write, quickly and right now. It is as if the next breath will no longer be the same, destroying the one before.

He writes, imagining himself as a journalist, an anthropologist and more often from an introverted and selfish point of view, thinking he’s a psychoanalyst, a sociologist. He drinks a lot of coffee in front of his typewriter, smokes cigars and stays up late into the night until the early morning. Once the desire to write hits, he must satisfy it in the moment. He cannot wait. Words come instinctively, as if they were already written and he only had to blow on the ink to dry them. They spread as fast as musical notes follow one another, always accompanied by a melody he cannot write down. He could never capture the melodies in his head, the ones that accompany the words. They are violent, stealthy and lightning-fast. As a spasm, a sudden pain underlines everything as ridiculous. Then the words are out, basic and fast – a signs’ series without meaning spat onto paper. A deaf music he struggles to catch, leaving behind assorted traces of color, like the tire tracks of a car speeding past, like a storm of things.

Before the storm passes, he must write. Once the melody evaporates, he forgets. He even forgets the colors, the sound, the words and… »why I wanted to write?”. It’s so fast, so inaccessible, that he exerts strategies to retain the melody for just a few seconds more. Without it, the words are bored and colors are dull.

At the first sounds he hears, he grabs paper, a pencil or his machine. He writes, writes, writes … it feels good but it is not enough. He breathes and tries to calm down. Then he reads again the last sentence and thinks: « what I was thinking about?”. He goes back to the first line and then forces himself, like a drug addict, to stop – terrified of losing himself.

His shaking fingers grip the table. He stops, exhausted, without taking time to read or understand a thing.

And in that moment, he erases everything.