Anguish and Reward

photo by Monalisa Adjami.

He comes home in the evening after a long day at the office, settles into his den, turns on his laptop, and in the cool glow of the screen he starts to make-believe. Interesting phrase: he makes believe. His fingers lightly tap on the keys, and a world begins to appear. He smiles, at times chuckles, at other times frowns and drags his fingers across his scalp. Creating worlds—bringing people out of the mortal soup into living breathing flesh—takes a lot of effort, mixed with pleasure, thrill, anguish, uncertainty. With the effort comes reward; these characters start to speak, at first only with hollow words that are obviously coming from himself, but within moments, their words start to stray from what he intended. Soon, they are jabbering away in their own tone of voice about their own cares. They say things he wasn’t expecting, and he doesn’t quite know how to reply to them, so then invents another character, and soon that character is refuting the first, and now the writer feels like he is just watching from a corner while these two people play out the scene. This is when he starts to smile, when his eyes catch fire with interest and wonder. What is going on here? He feels a little guilty for eavesdropping, but not enough to make him stop, for it is the guilty pleasure of the voyeur.