The Blank Page And Chaos

A Short Story

A famous writer lived in a city, and the city was inside of another city.

He created worlds while living in a world inside of another world.

The part of the town he lived in was the richest heart of a bigger city, populated of people of all kinds, people the writer feared, since he had been instructed to fear them for his entire life, like all the other people in the richer part of town had been told to.

The writer had been born in a rich family and was told he could be anything he wanted to be, so he chose to write and became rapidly famous.

But, after his first novel was published and became a huge success, he found himself facing the biggest challenge of his life, one he never thought he would have to face: the blank page.

He had completely lost his inspiration, and he had no idea where to find it again.

One day, looking outside his window into the distant horizon, he, for the first time in his life, wondered what lied beyond his rich town’s borders.

Who the people who lived there were, what they were doing, what they looked like.

Day after day, he continued to find himself staring at that blank page, then constantly wondering with his eyes beyond the city’s borders.

One morning, he finally made up his mind.

He was ready.

He went out the door and headed to that unknown part of the city.

He was surprised not to find any great gate, or other things to keep the two parts of the city separated, but just a street, that from the richer city went into the woods, just to pop up on the other side of the trees, directly into the other part of the city.

At first, he was scared.

He had never seen anything like that before. Everything was so different, so unknown, so weird, so scary.

He was afraid and walked keeping his hands on his pockets, but then, after a while, he allowed himself to relax, and actually try and see.

And so, he saw.

He saw the other city, he saw the other people, and everything was so different from what he had expected, from everything he was taught for his entire life.

It was the most colorful thing he had ever seen.

Everywhere, splashes of color blinked at him. Houses of different colors, without doors. People dressed like a multitude of little rainbows, shaking hands, smiling, touching each other.

Those were all things that were prohibited back in his city.

They were considered an obstacle to productivity, to living the best life you can.

Excessive colors, excessive socialization, were all things that didn’t exist in the other city because they were considered unacceptable distractions.

An old lady saw the writer was a little dazzled and invited him into her home to offer him some tea.

There, the writer found out that it was the other part of the city the one who decided to cut the richer part out, and not the other way round. They did that in order not to get infected with their ideas and values, something they didn’t share and found very dangerous to their lifestyle.

The old lady told him that that colorful, chaotic lifestyle was what that part of the city held the most precious. Just like the writer was taught for his entire life about the other part of the city’s lifestyle.

Finally, the writer saw everything with extreme clarity.

He thanked the old lady and went out of her doorless home, and, while he walked amongst that chaos, everything kept becoming clearer and clearer to him.

He went back home, sat down, and began to write.

© Francesca Dallaglio, 2021