Dear Desk (letter)

Dear desk,

     My faithful and loyal companion who has yet to fail me once. You have been there for me when the nights have been long, as well as when the days are spent hiding from the sun. Many words have been scribbled upon your sleek oak wood. Stories have taken form and characters have come to life. Surely this may have happened without your presence, but as my departure draws close, I see nothing but how useful you have been. You are a place of serenity and peace. You are a retreat from the everyday struggle with myself. When I sit in your chair, I can truly become myself through abstract ideas and words. Too many times I have spilled tea on your head, but I rarely left it there to burn you any more than it already had.

     It is difficult to say why I am writing this. Surely you are an inanimate object with no conscious thought process, and no way to care about the words that I use. But I am a man of fiction, and that brings you to life much just as much as my characters are alive. Right now you are littered with the papers for my newest novel. Each paper was scribbled on your wood surface with my pen. Most of it is character planning, with some locations being built through words that would find their way into the story somehow. Even now, as I write this letter to you, I am sitting on your chair with my laptop on your head. My shade-less lamp is lit like usual.

     But soon this will change. It will be left off for four months, until I return for no more than two weeks. I will have to dust you off to use you, and your contents will be known even less to me than they are now. I arranged the contents of the drawers just the other day, but I did not have the time to read each and every piece. Maybe one day someone will. The stories rest within you, awaiting for their time to come to light and be editing on your surface. But that will not happen for some time. I will be at a different desk, a foreign desk, in a foreign place with foreign people. Only the few possessions I will be allowed to bring with me will be familiar. You will remain and wait to be used again. There is much to be discovered amongst the thousands of papers that you hold within you. I have written most of it, but I always learn something new when I look back. I wonder if my new desk will have as much storage space in it. I hope to find out soon. If not, I will have to figure out what to do with all my papers that I will surely be writing at university. Consider the surge of inspiration that I received when I attended college. Now consider how much more intensified that will be when I am in Lennoxville and out of my element.

     The way in which I will write very well may change as well. I will have a roommate and my desk will be beneath my bed. I will not have as much room as I do here. I will be dealing with a sudden change, far from everything I grew up with. I will be able to contact this place and all the people I have left behind, but that which has served me use often has no method of communication, such as yourself. I have become comfortable right here in your chair for some time. I barely write anywhere else. It is my location, my workplace, where all else falls into nothing and I may do what matters to me most. But when I am living with a roommate, I wonder how often I will be dragged away from my work. I wonder what he will think my writing as. Will he believe it to be something I do for fun, or out of necessity? Will he see it as a joke, or take it seriously? Will it be a profession, or recreation? I await the answer with great anxiety. But for now, I suppose I should be writing yet another novel with you. Whether it has been handwriting "The Beginning of the End", "Kuna Zero: A Wanderer's Tale", "Who is the True Monster?" or typing "The Knife In Admeta's Back", "Love: A Chaotic Insanity", "The Tunnels", "A Plead to Iris", "The Return of Hope", and all the other various short stories and poems, you have served as the base for my work, despite the time of day or season. So with that, I finish this strange letter.

     Until I return,

-Zero