The Act of Writing

Ten minutes until zero.             The bright glint of sunlit steel burns into my eyes, leaving me blinking and temporarily blinded, as the men lift their rifles to their shoulders, the affixed bayonets the cause of the assault on my eyes. The dull silver blades flash spots of tarnished light across the shored up walls of the trench, and to my blurry vision it seems as though a thousand stars have come to grace us with their presence, a token of good luck from the souls of the ancestors.             I can feel it in my bones; we are destined to win this day.             Waves of khaki uniforms undulate haphazardly in the corner of my eye and I find myself blinking against both the spots in my vision and also the burn of unshed tears threatening their imminent arrival.        ...

Oh my darling. You were my whole world and I was yours. The things I had planned for us to do together, they spanned years, decades, our own little eternity of just you and me.             All that lost time is what hurts me the most.             You and I were going to do so many great things together. I say great, you and I were never going to make headlines, we were just two among billions, going about our daily lives, but even daily lives would have been perfect to me.             I really wish you and I had got to live our boring normal lives.             I love you so much. I know I shouldn’t, especially not now that you’re gone from my life and even the memory of you burns like the brightest star. But how could I forget you, how could I not think...

Drip, drip, drip. The rain steadily drops in though the hole in the roof, splashing into the bucket below the hole, each droplet strikingly loud in the utter silence of the room. The musty stench of moth eaten curtains is ever present, having eaten its way into the very fabric of the building decades ago. Dust lays, two inches thick, on every surface, tinting everything a dull, dirty grey. Cobwebs spiral out from every corner, the spiders who made them being long since dead, their corpses litter the carpet where they fell. The three occupants of the room however, do not seem to mind the dust, or the smell. They don't even appear to notice the steady dripping sound of the rain. Sat in a semi-circle, each on separate armchairs, they do not talk to each other, they do not look at each other. For all intents and purposes, they might as well each be in the room alone. Yet oddly, they mirror each other, arms dangling over the edges of their chairs, heads hung as if ashamed. They ...

That sick feeling in your stomach. The cloying nausea that sets into motion the swoops and swirls of molten lava in the pit of your belly. It claws its way upwards, setting up shop in the cavity of your chest, no longer does your heart reside there, no that's shrunken in fear, all that is left is the vague pain. It sends tremors down your arms, your fingers shaking uncontrollably. That feeling of dread. It makes you want to be physically sick. You know its coming. Lying in wait, somewhere just out of sight, out of your control. There is nothing you can do, and doesn't that just make it worse? The dread lies heavy in your gut, icy cold and you're always, always aware of it. It spreads, the ice, down into your legs, making you creak, one second away from cracking. Your shrunken heart beats frantically, almost hard enough to break your ribs and burst free of its cage of splintered bone. There isn't much time left. the wristwatch your father left to you, that...