The study

 Silence filled the small room he called his study. He went there when he needed silence so his words would flow smoothly. Outside, the noises of a family carried on without him for a while, at least until his heart had spoken and words put on paper.

There weren't hundreds of books in his study, no certificates of schools attended, or numerous writing awards; just a desk and a chair that looked out of a window into the forest where he got lost until that first word was written.

Sometimes, he'd watch his children play in the backyard, throwing sticks to their dog Skipper, playing hide-and-seek, and playing on their swings, pumping their little legs trying to reach the forest's trees. When they were called inside, he would again look at the trees, a bare canvas for inspiration.

He longed for perfect sentences, and then, like something magical, his pen began a journey that would lead him deep inside his mind and onto paper.

At times, he would go so far back into his memory that he wondered if he'd ever return, leaving him tired and relieved that his mind hadn't been too destroyed by his youth and all he'd ingested in the name of experiment and curiosity. There were moments when he wanted to do those things just one more time, to visit Alice in Wonderland or follow the Yellow Brick Road. But he had a family now, and escaping reality again was too scary.

So he went to his study, the small room once a nursery, and he picked his mind to write about what he saw as he bounced back and forth between reality and a desire to flash back to days in the forest that, for now, he can only look at through a window sitting at his desk looking at the many album covers that took the place of books on the wall. Zeplin, the Stones, The Doors, Jethro Tull, Cream, and more dove headfirst into his mind and have remained a source of his imagination, leading to hundreds of stories, some real and others probably from the deepest part of his mind, that will keep him guessing until the ink runs dry.

Mike 2024