Dilemma - a story by Michelle D'costa

Her mind was like a room split into two halves. One half had a dim light cast on her writing desk and a solitary chair and the other half had fluorescent light cast on two solitary chairs. She often found her consciousness shifting between both halves like a pendulum.

When she zipped into her writing gear she found herself enveloped in dim light, the blank lines on her page mocking her writer’s block. For some time now, her pen and paper couldn’t give her company.

 

So she moved across to the part of the room which had two chairs bathed in fluorescent light. She lit a cigarette and took a puff. She sat down on one of the chairs’ and looked at the other. She then used her cigarette to burn a hole into the other chair’s arm rest.

As the smoke crept its way into her thoughts, she thought she knew what she wanted to write about so she granted her cigarette a premature death and strolled across to her writing desk. Her eyes didn’t need any adjusting to the light. She was used to it by now.

As she sat down she began penning down her thoughts before they could disappear but she immediately regretted it and looked over to the other side of the room.

She missed her cigarette. She shouldn’t have killed it too soon. She could have burnt down her paper with it.