the secret life of a starved artist

a sylvia plath-esque essay on writer's block

“I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.”

— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

you awake at sunrise, with the light of the sun penetrating your closed eyelids as your face rests among pages and pages of unwritten thoughts. the chill bites your bare shoulders as your sweater lays there on the ground, left abandoned from last night as you rested against the radiator — you can still feel those second degree burns beneath your tank top, but you haven’t got the heart to care — staring longingly at the front door, waiting for the Muses to barge through and bring your starved soul back to life.

you’re staring intently at the white walls of your shoebox apartment: you haven’t eaten (you’ve probably lost a ton of weight), you haven’t smiled or laughed in a long time, nobody has ever seen you leave those four walls you call home… you’re still sitting there. waiting. for what? you don’t know, yet you still grieve for the words and those golden truths that refuse to spill out from your slit wrists. there’s a quiet rustling of pages, and a low growl. your ears twitch as you hear a glimpse of song from the Muses who have left you here to die.

you’re now standing up, walking out onto your small balcony. you’re in your bikini bottoms (you haven’t done the laundry for several weeks), your dark hair rests on your shoulders, covering those scars, all greasy and slicked back. you soak up the Sun’s glow, longing for Apollo to grant you freedom from this cycle of hell you live in. your heart is wide open, bled dry and tired, and your soul wearily takes in the bustling sound of life moving on. you watch the busy streets, distant yells from drunken old men who’ve got nothing to live for, and cars inching down dark, dusty roads. life is moving on, yet you are trapped within this timeless bubble that resets with every sunset. you can only pray that this time it will be different. you can only pray that the Muses will hear you despite the sounds of their laughter as they dance upon the hot springs.

you want that cycle to stop.