Unwritten by Addison McGurn
Elise was folded over,
her elbows resting on her knees, and her head bowed so it was hovering between her legs.
She could no longer see the dense, neutral carpet, for the position she was in caused her tears to drip down from her eyes, onto the lenses of her glasses, and slowly fill them up like a glass of saltwater.
Elise had been sitting like this for almost three hours. She could feel the seconds ticking by. And, thanks to the round analogue clock in the center of the far wall, she could hear them as well. The soft tick-tick-ticking of the thin hand, resonating along her eardrum like a hammer on a giant metal gong. But it wasn’t just for the clock that she could tell that time was passing. Elise could feel it inside of her. As if the rhythmic hand had found its way into her bones and the very composition of her being. She could feel the seconds reverberating throughout her body, trapping her in some sort of trance that she’d never felt before. How interestingly unexplainable it was. To be confined inside of this prison without bars, this cage without a lock. Elise didn’t understand. She couldn’t understand. These four walls weren’t holding her hostage. She could leave whenever she wanted to. Yet it was almost as if the essence of the room itself was keeping her from going. As if some non-existent force at play was keeping her from leaving. Keeping her from lifting her head to let the tears drip down onto the carpet so she might once again be able to see the floor. Her conscious mind knew she was free. But her subconscious, that tiny voice in the back of her mind that had been growing in volume for the past three hours, told her that she was trapped.
There was a table. In the center of this room. The very perfect center of it; Elise couldn’t believe how centered it was. She had spent many moments contemplating this table. A crucial reason being that, in the perfect center of this perfectly centered table sat a typewriter.
Elise was still hunched over, her head between her knees. The tears on the lenses of her glasses had begun to dry, causing a foggy, milky surface through which she viewed the floor. It made her unsettled, more so than she already was, not being able to make it out. And the uncertainty made her subconscious begin to look in search of something clearer. That’s when she began to feel it. The click-click-clicking of the typewriter keys; like they themselves were vibrating off the walls of her skull. Click, click… the sound echoed through her head, pulling her into this seemingly inanimate object. And that, the concrete realness of this object that she believed to be true, lifted her head.
Elise stared at the typewriter. She fixated her eyes on it harder than she had on any object before now. It looked as if she was staring through it. But that couldn’t be farther from the truth.
There she was. Elise. She saw herself standing in front of a door that she’d never noticed.
She saw the round clock on the wall, and she saw the table, in the very perfect center of the room. Except this table was empty. It had no typewriter. No clicking, no keys. And Elise felt herself knocking. Knock-knock-knocking on the door of her mind, locked from the outside. She was trapped.
Like the ticking of the clock on the wall. The clicking of the typewriter keys. The knocking of her fist on the door. She couldn’t get out. She was stuck there, as she had been for as long as she could remember. But not physically. It was a prison without bars, a cage without a lock. She was stuck inside her mind. This typewriter was a mirror. And she was watching herself from the outside, looking in.
Elise sat up straight in her chair, and removed her glasses. Instantly, the room came into focus, each object twisted itself into something new. Something that she had once believed to be entirely different. She gazed up at the clock, the second hand ticking away, while the two larger hands stayed exactly where they were. How interesting. How there can be both movement and static at the same exact time. She lifted her arm and reached to the center of the table, pushing the lever of the typewriter so the blank page shifted from one side to the other. Her hands hovered above the keys as she closed her eyes. Her entire body stalled. Then Elise took a deep breath, and wrote two words. Two simple words. And with them, she began to write herself out.