The Idea Vault

What happens when one writes about Writer's Block?

There is a room in me with no windows.
A thick-lipped door. A dial that turns in silence.
No lock clicks — not exactly. But it does not open unless it wants to.
This is the vault.
I put everything there.

Once, I held a story between my teeth like a secret.
It tasted like salt and bruises. He wore a coat too heavy for the sea.
I whispered his name.
The vault swallowed him whole.

Later, a boy with glass-cut cheekbones and century-old hands
pressed his fingers to the keys of a piano that no longer played.
He still tried.
That too — an idea.
Filed away, unfinished. Waiting.

Sometimes I get the key in.
Sometimes I even hear the tumblers shift —
a groan, a flicker, a near-miss heartbeat.
But most days, I stare at the steel
and tell myself I’m not waiting —
just resting.
Just thinking.
Just not right now.

I am the archivist of unrealised stories.
I catalogue them by ache.
By spark.
By the version of me who believed he could write them.

There’s a traveller who sends letters to no one.
A killer who learned to feel too late.
A swan-boy who dances like he’s made of shame.
A deepwater thing with moss for a name.
And me —
Split across pages that haven’t yet begun.

Me, with borrowed bloodlines.
Neurodivergent thoughts flickering faster than my fingers can follow.
Adopted into contradiction,
queer in body and question,
writing myself open through the mask of Noah —
who says the sharp things I’ve only dared to think.

I open the vault when the mood is right —
when the air stings just enough,
when the brain fog lifts for a breath,
when my neurons stop chasing static,
when perfectionism is quieter than possibility.

I take one idea out.
Hold it like glass.
Watch it flicker between form and fatigue.
Begin.

But then:
Spontaneity knocks, arms full of something new.
The old spark sputters.
Or I start rewriting the same line twelve times
because if it's not perfect, it isn’t anything.
Or the energy just... vanishes.

So I return both —
the born and the barely breathing —
into the vault.
Together.

The door hums as it closes.
Not locked.
Just waiting.

Because whether it’s myth or memory,
selkies or gender,
blood or politics,
every story I write
— fiction or not —
tries to say something human.
Something true.
Something almost free.

Tomorrow, maybe,
the key will fit again.