The room is quiet now, still, peaceful. It’s not silent, there are the familiar sounds of the night. The hooting of the owl in the apple tree outside the window, the occasional rush of traffic from the road on the other side of the house, the familiar snoring from the room next door.
Today was a long day. It’s been hours since she stopped working and I can still feel the echoes of fingers drumming on my top, I can still hear her frustrated huffs, and I’m fairly certain there’s a new scratch in my woodwork where a pen was thrown down in frustration. I’ve been around long enough to know the tell-tale signs of writer’s block or an impending deadline. This time it’s a combination of the two. She talks a lot, especially to herself.
Sometimes I wonder if she knew that I was listening if she would talk as much. I hear everything, the phone calls she makes (both private and professional), the conversations she has with the occasional visitors to the house. She like’s open doors and sound travels well. She also talks aloud when she’s working. She tests ideas out, acts out the parts of the different characters in her stories, sounds out different sentence structures.
Sometimes I wish I could talk back. Tell her which ideas I like, and which completely suck. Above all I wish I could tell her that I’m a desk, and not a bloody draining board. I’m sure she just brings up mugs then forgets to take them down. At least until my surface is so cluttered she can barely work, and then she takes all of them away at once.
Soon a new day will start, and the routine of working and talking will begin again.
A Place of Mine 