Nothing good will come out of this, I tell myself, you’ve tried before, why do you think that it would be different now?
For reasons that are unknown even to me, another part of my brain propels my body forward through the threshold. People look up, and turn toward the new person who is in the room. I can’t tell if they even want me to be here.
Odds are, they don’t.
On the left side of the room, There are people in groups of three. From one of them, a person on the left side sits, not paying attention to anything but the clock slightly above the doorway.
“What do you need?” They ask quickly.
Why am I here? I don’t know. What are they doing in here anyway?
“What is this?” I reply, committing one of the sins of conversation, answering a question with another question. I look around, I don’t know anyone here, but I recognise them.
“This is creative writing...”
That’s right, writing, that’s why I’m here. To see people with the same interests as I do. Like the counselor told me to.
“...and if you don’t have writer’s block like I do, you can get some paper from there.” he points at the desk with a pile of blank paper, my eyes follow, “You probably have a pencil already, and later today, we’ve planned to share what we have so far.”
I estimate about three hundred and forty seven sheets of paper in that pile. Most stores sell them at about five dollars for two hundred sheets, and if they started out with ten dollars worth of paper, they have already used about fifty sheets of paper. That’s a lot.
I look around, and see most people with at least four pages of paper piled up next to them and half of another filled.
Say something, Sit down, Grab a paper.
I decide to listen to myself and do that, in that order.
“Thanks. How many people are in this?”
“You’re the eleventh, maybe twelfth member of this.”
I go to a chair near the door, about three feet away from where I am, and a lot more than an arm’s reach away from the table with pile of paper of a little less than three hundred and fifty pages thick.
I stand up again, and get exactly four sheets of paper from the pile, and go back to the desk.
Now what? I have the paper, but what do I write?