Diet Coke with Lime

You sit down at your computer with that intense feeling, like orange rinds in the back of your throat. It’s always after you’ve seen something innocuous, everyday, but with the easy undercurrent of searching for your soul on your own time, the thing that makes your hands want to dance for a while and the bubble that’s waiting inside to expand ‘til you pop. There’s something futile in the way your fingers hit the keyboard, tap-tapping their shuffle-step-hop like a dancer with an impending injury. Your eyes squint in the deep poetic way you’ve always noticed when you wrote something great, and you pause every so often to finger the binding of the soul-searching book you’ve been reading, should perchance some pixie be floating by and transfer its hand-dancing inspiration into your palms.1

There’s a religious desperation hidden deep within the slight downturn of your lips, a grit sourcing perhaps from an ancestor who scraped out his existence on parchment, papyrus or stone. He, you’re sure, had the inspiration thing down to a science: this much liquor plus that much moonlight minus the sound of any animal mating ritual that might be going on.  He, of course, lived before the cliché was invented, before there were any rules that said you had to have the frank bittersweet tone, with a little saccharine tinge of regret, when you wrote. His law was the iamb, the limitations of a hieroglyph, and what pigments he could derive from buffalo gristle as opposed to pestle-ground berries. 2

Of course, he didn’t have the necessary accessories. You are fully equipped with a Diet Coke with Lime (the flavor you want your writing to be), an empty white wall to stare at for inspiration, and a desk lamp with three different settings: angst, soul-purge, and homework. Right now it’s off, the best way to achieve your desired Sugar-Lo shade, and your sip of phenylalanine goodness leaves just the right amount of sticky condensation imprints on the keyboard.3

Your tale is elegantly and simplistically written, flawless in its unexpected imagery and well surpassing your expectations, the kind that flows from your fingers without stopping until it reaches its indie rock anti-conclusion. The cursory readthrough will show no flaws, of course, and as you drain your non-fat calorie-free slightly twisted soda, you’re already dreaming of the expression on your English teacher’s face when you hand it in after summer vacation as her first extra-credit piece (no, it’s just something you wrote, you don’t want credit, ma’am…). You snatch it from the printer, still warm, and hustle it off to show your parents your poetic glory, drinking in your newest masterpiece as you go and occasionally bumping on a wall. Alas, there’s a typo; back to the machine to change it and print another. You check it one more time to ensure no problems, and have the ‘save as’ button ready to go when you take another look, of course, just to gloat for a few moments more. 4

Quietly, your bed invites you with the original innocuous paperback, waiting for you to come take its class again, and when you glance up at your computer, the sticky keyboard and empty Word document are still waiting.5