The hardest part is looking at a black page.
Not an original thought but a thought all the same. At least Madhuri was thinking.
After every seizure Madhiru had she would find a piece of paper and test the theory. As a wanna-be writer she often wished that her theory would be proven. That one-day the traumatic electrical impulses that caused her seizures would also address her writers’ block.
This hope helped with every, ever more, ever closely occurring seizure. Perhaps she would think something the world wanted to know before the next big one, the next longer one, or the final fatal one.
She often had glimpses of plagiaristic genius. The story of a girl and a boy who find love despite the protestations of their family, the life story of a girl whose feet have been bound in the sadistic Chinese tradition, the story of the daughter of a Polish Navi survivor who now lives in New York. Every time she would put pen to paper it would end in one of two ways, plagiarism or a seizure. Madhuri wasn’t sure what was worse.
Both made her tired and both made her feel like a failure as a human being.
She had nothing to draw on. No great spiritual connection to her namesake homeland. The only Hindi words she knew were her name and those of her family, although she did once look up poop, Gōlī calānē kī āvāza. She didn’t know what her name meant. Neither did her parents. They were migrants to Australia. They had no home. She would be foreign in India just as she was foreign in Australia.
She knew more about American popular culture; she knew more about web based social communication than she did interpersonal communication. Having seizures at school functions certainly didn’t win you any friends. Let alone any boyfriends. God she wanted a boyfriend or a girlfriend or a sexual predator. If anyone approached her sexually she would have counted it as a win.
Her coke bottle glasses and fondness for lack of physical control made sure that didn’t happen. All she wanted to be to was a writer. She couldn’t even do that.
She sought council from her English teacher. She didn’t do well in English, her teacher treated her assessments with the same distain you would a piece of toilet paper that hasn’t met your expectations.
“Read more,” said Mrs Gilsepe. Mrs Gilespe resembled the dobermans she walked around their small town, pointy, uninviting and terrifying from the right angle.
She had read more and it just resulted in more plagiarism.
The only thing she wanted to do was to write. How could she be unable to write anything, she thought.
