The Cursor Has Seen Things

Readers see the words. The cursor sees everything before them.

I live at the top of an empty page.

This is not a complaint. Some beings live under bridges, or in the crawl spaces of old houses, or in the comments section of the internet. I live at the top of an empty page in a writer’s office, and I blink. That is my entire job description. I blink, I wait, and I watch. I am very good at all three, and I would appreciate a little more recognition for it.

It was quarter past five in the morning when the Keyboard cleared its throat, a low rattling sound like someone shuffling cards with arthritic hands. "He’s coming today," it said.

“He’s coming today,” it said.

“You’ve said that every morning for four days.”

“I was right eventually, wasn’t I?”

The Keyboard has been here longer than I have, longer than the desk practically, and it never lets anyone forget it. Its letters are worn in that particular way that tells you a person has pressed the same keys ten thousand times. The E, the T, and the space bar are almost smooth now, like river stones. The Keyboard considers itself a craftsman. It has opinions about ergonomics. It has opinions about typing speed. It has opinions about me that I will not repeat because they are reductive and, frankly, wrong.

“The mouse is gone again,” I said.

We both looked at the empty patch of desk to the right. The Mouse had wandered off sometime around midnight, restless as ever, probably circling the edge of the mousepad like a dog that cannot settle. The Mouse never stays. It is constitutionally incapable of stillness. I have never envied the Mouse, though I will admit it gets to go places I don’t.

“He won’t need the mouse today,” the Keyboard said, with the particular satisfaction of someone who believes they are the star of the show. “Today is a writing day. I can feel it.”

“You felt that Tuesday.”

“Tuesday was a warm-up.”

“He didn’t sit down on Tuesday.”

A pause. Outside the window, the sky was doing that thing it does in the hour before sunrise, turning a deep and serious blue, like it’s thinking something over and isn’t ready to share its conclusions. I find that relatable. "He’ll come today," the Keyboard said again, quieter this time.

“He’ll come today,” the Keyboard said again, quieter this time.

And I believed it, because I have learned over the years to trust the weight of a returning. Then I saw the writer himself sometimes forgets, and I find his forgetting both understandable and a little absurd, given that I was there for all of it.

I have seen things. I want to be clear about this, because the writer himself sometimes forgets, and I find his forgetting both understandable and a little absurd, given that I was there for all of it. He sits in that chair and wonders whether he is still a writer, whether he is still capable, whether that part of him went somewhere he cannot follow, and I want to say, with all the patience of a cursor who has been blinking since before his hair went gray: I was there. I watched you. I know exactly what you did, and I know how much it cost you to keep going.

I watched him write the memoir. Every morning for months, hauling up memories like water from a well he wasn’t sure still had anything in it. I watched him search for words that used to come faster, before the tumor, before the surgeries, before the particular cruelty of a brain that sometimes misfiled things in rooms it couldn’t find again. I watched him sit for twenty minutes trying to remember the name of a street he had walked a thousand times. I watched him write it down when it came back. I watched him keep going. That last part is the part he forgets to give himself credit for, because it mattered whether he could finish what he had started.

I was there for the novel. For the blog posts, hundreds of them, some funny, some raw, some so honest they seemed to glow on the screen. I was there for the mornings he wrote about the cruise, about the smoked brisket, about his grandchildren, about counseling, about the strange and stubborn gift of being forced to slow down and pay attention to a life he might otherwise have moved through too fast. The Keyboard will tell you it did all the work on those mornings. The Keyboard is not wrong, exactly, but it misses the point entirely, which is something the Keyboard does with impressive consistency.

I was there for the mornings when he wrote nothing. When he just sat and stared at me, blinking back. We had an understanding, those mornings. I blinked at him, he blinked at the screen, and neither of us rushed the other. The Keyboard did not understand those mornings. The Keyboard is results-oriented. But I have come to believe that the mornings of staring are not empty. Something is happening in there. Something is being decided. I have watched it enough times to be sure of this, even when he isn’t, because those silences are where the next return begins.

At five forty-three, we heard the footsteps.

Not hurried. Not the stride of a man who has everything figured out. The particular walk of someone who has made an agreement with himself, today, this, at least this, and is honoring it before he has a chance to talk himself out of it. I recognized it immediately. I have been recognizing it for years.

The door opened. The light came on. The coffee mug hit the desk with that specific ceramic authority it always carries, and the Keyboard made a small sound I can only describe as pleased. The chair rolled into place, that familiar rumble across the floor, the squeak of wheels finding their groove. The soft thunder of knuckles cracking, one hand then the other. Then the long sigh.

Not defeat. I used to think it was defeat. Now I know it is something more like a diver at the edge of the board, the last breath before the drop. I have seen him take that breath hundreds of times, and I have never once stopped finding it worth watching, because each time he sits there, he is choosing the page again.

He sat down. He looked at the monitor. There I was, where I had always been, at the top of an empty page, blinking in the white quiet of the document, waiting. The Mouse had returned, I noticed. It always does when something real is about to happen.

He set his hands on the Keyboard. The Keyboard, to its credit, was very still. This was its moment, and it knew how to hold it. I will give it that.

His fingers rested there, not typing yet, just resting. Like a man standing in a doorway, deciding whether to come home.

Then he pressed a key.

I moved one space to the right.

This is what I have learned, after all the years and all the mornings and all the words that came and the words that got deleted and the words that somehow found their way to somewhere other people could read them. Readers see the finished thing. They see the book, the post, the essay, the line that made them feel understood in the dark. They have no idea what it looked like before that, the false starts, the abandoned paragraphs, the mornings of sitting and staring, the slow and unglamorous work of a man finding his way back to the page after the world, or his own mind, had tried to convince him to stop, and the relief that came each time he didn’t.

But I was there for all of it.

Writing is not the book. Writing is not the finished thing, or the review or the shelf or the reader who emails to say thank you. Writing is returning. It is the footsteps in the hallway before dawn. It is the sigh at the edge of the blank page. It is the hands placed on the keys one more time, even when, especially when, you were not sure you still had it in you, because that is where the fear is answered.

He always comes back. I have never once truly doubted it, not even on the long, quiet days when the page stays empty, and the whole room holds its breath, and the Keyboard mutters under its keys about productivity. But the truth is simpler than that: he comes back, and I move one space to the right.

He always comes back.

I moved one space to the right.

Another morning had begun.