I wish I was my redheaded coworker. Not for reasons related to looks or style or attitude, although she is a unique person, but because I envy her refusal to dismiss herself and her particular craft. She perches in skirts of heavy denim or corduroy, ankles brushing the edges, and knit sweaters varying in color swallow her wisp of a frame. She soaks it in like insulin, it being the very brick and mortar of whatever space she inhabits. Roosting, her pale gaze soaks in the people, the questions from their lips, their appearances, their mannerisms. She's a master translator, not just of what these people are saying but of something deeper... something she reads in them and then transcribes in their wake. It doesn't take her more than a glance to pick up on secret meanings in the bat of an eye, the quiver of a hand. We see hundreds of people each week, answering questions and then seeing them on their way. They are rarely named, these mere phantoms of inquiry that pass before us. If I happened across one--and I occasionally do after-the-fact--I do not remember what their question was or whether I succeeded in helping them. Too numerous and fleeting, I suppose. Yet she sees them and sucks the marrow from barely minutes of interaction. Each moment she lives she's somehow absorbing as nutrient, as fertilizer, as fuel. Her fingers fly with renewed power as she catches conversations floating past, her words tapped out on a keyboard almost as soon as the voices dissipate. I am not her. Though I sit like her, I look around and pretend I'm participating in this osmosis, this exchange of life blood. I used to be her, I think, in the "golden age" of the craft. I've heard all of the naysayers attempt to tell me otherwise: "Of course you've still got it" they scoff, eyes rolling back, never doubting that I'm just being modest, just being hard on myself, just being the way I've always been. Yet I know what they don't. I feel myself shy away from the page. Blank white spaces are full of toil and turmoil. I feel allergic, terrified, in absolute darkness staring at the blinding light burning my retinas into the grey ash that falls from half-smoked cigarettes. If I can't see, how can I write? "But you've seen her." I've seen her. In her unapologetic basking, I've managed to see something for the first time in half a decade. As I gaze, I feel my skin prickling from years of parched existence. All she does is answer the call that I used to be able to answer, yet in doing so she has somehow prompted me to take another look at those blinding white spaces. Instead of flinching, I consider approaching. I am wary, yet curious. What might happen if I face this blinding demon that's tormented me for so long? What happens if I begin moving these stiff, arthritic fingers? What if I re-learn from her what I used to master so intuitively? Can old dogs learn old tricks? Nobody's asked that before. I am going to discover the answer, one letter, one word, one sentence, one paragraph at a time. This is the Daily Prompt.

04.30.15

04.30.15