He sat behind the old desk, his head tilted slightly backwards…”
The words materialized on the page as if dredged from silt, shaky but unmistakable. He stared at them, the pen trembling in his grip. Six months. Six months since he’d last let ink bleed into paper, and 2 years since he’d sworn to let his personal stories suffocate in their own silence. Yet here he was, hunched in the same chair, the same dust motes swirling in the same thin light. The old diary on the table, open like a wound.
He’d tried to forget. Killed all his thoughts, burned his books, taken up finance full time — finance, of all things — just to quiet the itch in his hands. And for a time, it worked. His creativity lost its edge, his eyes their manic gleam. But the void left by unwritten words grew teeth. It gnawed at him in the quiet hours, whispering that his truest self had been buried alongside his prose.
The desk had called to him that morning. Not a metaphor, not a poet’s lie. A literal call: wood groaning, drawers rattling, the typewriter’s carriage bell chiming once, soft as a funeral toll. When he’d entered the study, the diary was already open. The moth-eaten page screamed its final vow: I WILL WRITE NO MORE. But beneath it, in the margins, something new had sprouted—a single sentence, written in his own hand, though he had no memory of it:
“He sat behind the old desk, his head tilted slightly backwards…”
A beginning. Or an ending. Maybe both.
He’d scoffed, slammed the diary shut. But the sentence followed him. Into the kitchen, down to the office, through the numb rituals of his day as a finance analyst. By dusk, it had coiled around his lungs, squeezing until he gasped for air that wasn’t there. This is how it wins, he thought. Not with grand epiphanies, but with a single, stubborn seed.
Now, here. Pen in hand. He knew, that as it was in the beginning, so it would be at the end... A never ending circle...
And so...
“He sat behind the old desk, his head tilted slightly backwards…”
THE END... OR THE BEGINNING?