Freehand

I never take the time to write anymore -- and I mean that on so many levels, it's hard to count. I don't take the time to use pen and paper -- keyboards and Word and blogging and e-mail are so much faster, you know, and yes, it's a little more impersonal, but at least it's legible. But I find that I've sucked the life out of writing -- with no thrill of pen across paper, no satisfaction from a notebook filled with jotted-down thoughts and scraps of poetry, pieces of dialogue to be filed at a later time -- with none of that, what reason is there to write? Why pick up this pen? Why rest my fingertips in the proper QWERTY formation when, in the end, the words just disappear like the thoughts that formed them?

This post is brought to you by this week's Fifty Words. I chose to limit myself to five minutes of free writing for this exercise. Due to a recent fascination with the visual nature of the written word, I give you the exercise in its original form. (My apologies to Miss Moss, who struggled in vain to perfect my handwriting.)