Ryan drained his FIFA Deustchland 2002 commemorative mug, the multicolored logos of countless sponsors emblazoned on it almost completely disintegrated after years of being washed, microwaved, and accidentally left for days in the kitchen to encrust and develop its own ecosystem. He was getting terribly annoyed at the blank document flashing in front of him. It wasn’t even real paper, acting all high and mighty just because it had lights swimming through overpriced liquid crystal; how dare it mock him (especially that infuriating cursor, aptly named, Ryan thought bitterly, because it cursed all the ideas out of his head). He continued staring at the soulless screen, muttering variations of “Gapookles” under his breath. Gapookles was a substitute swear word he had invented; in his desperation to churn out something for his expectant editor he made a pact to quit brain and speech-swearing, in exchange for a trickle of inspiration. Clearly it doesn’t work that way; he had been glaring at the blank Word file for the last nine days and counting. Gapookles.
The signs that he was losing his current war against The Block was seen all over his work space. Under his room’s only window, his forty-year-old desk, a relic from his deceased grandfather (never met him; Lolo Rodelo had died before the fall of Marshall Law with his fat-lined heart full of hope and love for F. Marcos, bless it), had at least 17 new watermarks from when he forgot to put a coaster under his beloved mug. Apparently he forgot it again today as he set his mug down carelessly near the edge of the desk.
For the last six hours and forty-seven minutes he had seriously considered just giving up on it completely; quite possibly, it wasn’t his destiny to become a writer; maybe he was supposed to be an accountant and he just missed the train, that one lesson (probably in high school) that would have made him interested in numbers and devote the rest his life in pursuit of its beauty. He might have been in a different place now; certainly not here, in this attic room in a boarding house, trying to leech unsecured internet off from a neighboring house with his blasted second-hand notebook computer with the empty, taunting screen.
But then, lifting his eyes for a split second off the computer to his open window, the skyline almost invisible, blocked by a smattering of ill-fitting balconies and laundry lines, he caught a glimpse of the midnight moon, which astonishingly looked exactly like a Bat Signal. Ryan’s brow furrowed as he suddenly recalled a line delivered by the then-White-Knight of Gotham, Harvey Dent, just as if he was screaming it directly to his ear: “You can’t give in!”
It was completely out of context, Ryan knew. Despite that, he felt his head snap back into alertness, and, after refilling his FIFA Deutschland 2002 commemorative mug (and grabbing a coaster from his landlady’s kitchen), he headed back into his attic, squared his shoulders, took a steadying breath, and, for the umpteenth time, he started to write.
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A/N:
The day started out perfectly well, but then after I got home things started going downhill. The problem is, while I do realize that whatever it is that is upsetting me doesn’t have even a speck of importance in the grand scheme of things, it’s still upsetting. So I swore that I’d write something, even if it was just drabble, before going to bed, just to sort out some thoughts I had. The snippet above doesn’t have much to do with what pissed me off today, but it helped. 
