"I can do this all day." No response. "I’m not giving up this time." Still Nothing. It was so stupid, I was practically talking to myself. It was going to be a stare down, but I wasn’t going to lose this time. I couldn’t lose. I had eliminated all the distractions that so frequently kept my attention. I could focus, and I would focus, on what needed to be done. Of course, this meant nothing if I couldn’t think.

The blank screen mocked me with the faint distorted reflection of myself I saw in it, uninterrupted by any progress on my part. It hurt every time I saw it, in fact it wouldn’t be too far-fetched to say it was this pain and mockery that often led me to seek out distractions. It almost felt pointless. No matter what I did I couldn’t fill the screen without… inspiration. Like a rushing breeze, an idea flew right by my face. I grabbed it by the tail mid-flight and started to type. I held it in place, and with every flail and useless struggle my grip grew tighter. With the word count rising, I was finally on my way to writing something great. Something worth reading.

After four hours, my fingers were still punching the keys, I didn’t want to lose. Three more hours in and I was getting tired. I rummaged around for the cheap digital clock buried under a pile of papers. I could just make out the red glowing 2:46 AM. That would explain the kink in my neck that felt like the stalk of an old withering rose bush, thorns and all. And much like a dying rose, my head was beginning to droop.

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I woke up, slowly realizing where I was and what had happened while I slept. Like a numbness wearing off I began to feel panic. Waking up is never fast, in fact it’s almost always like a numbness is wearing off. One I finally woke up though, my head whipped up and it took the rest of my body with it. And my chair. And a good deal of papers from my desk, several of which had glued themselves to my face. It was a fair sized mess, but so was the rest of the room, so it didn’t really bother me

My first thought disregarded the pain that was spreading through my back and side, and went directly to the computer. It was a fairly new, at least new to me, but outdated laptop. In addition to its rapid antiquity, it was... in disrepair. A glass of water had rendered the natural keyboard a cipher for some bizarre secret code I just couldn’t type through, the rubber bumps on the bottom that kept it in place had fallen off, and not only did it overheat much faster than it should, it needed to be plugged in the entire time or the battery would die within five minutes. It would be cheaper to buy a new one than to fix it, but I couldn't afford either and had settled for a new keyboard that I had to plug and set in front of the poor machine

The screen was black. Not the promising illuminated black that I’d been hoping for, but instead the dead, powered down, natural lifeless color of the screen. I hit the power button and cleaned the mess of papers I’d made while I waited for it to boot up. One office chair, a few hundred pieces of now unorganized paper later, and I logged on. As soon as the generic landscape background loaded, I knew all hope was lost for my work.

I persisted anyway. Sometimes the word processor automatically saved data or had recoverable data. I looked through my documents, but with little luck. The file had to be saved first to auto-save later. I’d fallen asleep while typing and it had overheated. There wasn’t a trace of all my hard work. Seven hours of work and I didn’t have a single sentence to show for it.

I slammed my head down on my desk, sending papers flying all over again. "You are such a failure!" I groaned. "Why do you even try to write when stupid stuff like this happens every single time?" I just had so many ideas crossing my mind, and the few people that I’d let read the writing I somehow managed to finish had liked it. That wasn’t saying much though, I was only a junior in a second rate high school and I had only really shown my work to teachers and my mother. By comparison anyone with a decent background and a decent education could do better.

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I couldn’t face my failure any longer. In the face of defeat, the pain and mockery in my reflection on the screen, I shied away. I put the laptop in hibernate and left the room. It was still early and I didn’t have anywhere to be just yet. I made my way down the only hallway in my small apartment and into the dining room/living room.

There was a note on the kitchen counter. I didn’t bother reading it, it always said the same thing every morning. "Left for work, breakfast is on the table. Stay safe. Love you, Mom." A bagel spread with a thin layer of cream cheese and a glass of orange juice were waiting on the table for me. Mom always worried about my eating habits and insisted on at least making me breakfast every morning. I could understand why she worried, I didn’t have the best track record when it came to physical health. I’d logged too many hours on my computer and not enough actually exerting myself.

I sat down at the dining room table and watched the news on our tiny TV while I ate. Personally I would have preferred to have a conversation with... well, anyone, but there was no one else to talk to let alone anything to talk about. The apartment was always empty in the mornings. Mom was at work and the only time I saw her was on Sundays, and she was usually asleep the entire time. That was if she didn’t have to work an extra shift. I would have bought a pet to fill the void but the super, who I never seemed to see, didn’t allow pets.

My Mom worked at a catering company, she baked and cooked mostly but she could do, and often did, any of the other odd jobs. She was always picking up extra shifts in the bakery or shouldering her way into a big party as a server. The pay wasn’t fantastic, but somehow she managed to keep us above the poverty line. She would say that with all her extra work it was only a matter of time before she was promoted to manager. As much I hoped she would get a better position so that we could spend more time together, I hardly knew her. At least I didn’t know her as well as I would have liked.

As much as I disliked it, work was usually about all we really talked about, and even these conversations were few and far between. I didn’t talk much, hardly at all, really only when I was spoken to first. It’s not like I was shy or anything, for some reason I just didn’t feel the need to talk. I let out all my pent up communication in my writing, however I will admit that my lack of communication severely handicapped what I was capable of describing.

The news kept playing on the TV as I cleaned up my dishes and I vaguely listened to a story about a mugging gone wrong as I worked. Mom had been in a hurry and had left her dishes on the counter, giving me something else to spend a few minutes on while I continued to listen to stories of how dangerous the world around me was. I still had another hour to kill, but nothing else left to do. I could watch the news, but I wasn’t that fond of listening to the same thing for the hundredth time so they could fill a time slot. Taking "the long way" to school seemed to be a reasonable way to waste the rest of my morning.

I threw my backpack over my shoulder and left the apartment. The elevator was still out of service so I took the stairs, from the third floor it was six flights to the street. Yet another delay I didn’t particularly mind. The second I made it down and opened the door the sounds of the city assaulted my ears. Some people like the sound of traffic jams, a million people talking at once, and the rest of the sounds that city life entails. I preferred to drown it all out with music from a very cheap mp3 player and equally cheap and uncomfortable ear buds. I shoved both of the plastic buds into my ears, even if the left one didn’t work. The scratches from the hard plastic on my ears were worth the near silence that the buds provided.

The long way to school consisted of a circle around my block and an extra side road that went through a dangerous section of town. I wasn’t afraid though, I could run if I needed to. Whether I was fast enough to escape remained a mystery to me, I’d never had to run for my life before. I’d walked this route several times and never once encountered a problem. Of course that was a problem. Life consists of conflict. I had lived for sixteen and a half years and never really seen any. Apparently whatever force it was that guided the universe had saved up sixteen and a half years of conflict to serve out just to me. What remained to be seen was whether this would be my unlucky day.