The cursor blinked at me for forty minutes before I admitted defeat. Not the story—just the opening line. I'd been trying to write about a woman who collects shadows, but every sentence felt like wearing someone else's shoes.

I made tea. Chamomile, though I wanted coffee. Sometimes the small deprivations sharpen things.

When I sat back down, I deleted everything except one word: beneath. Not even a sentence, just a preposition hanging in white space. But it felt true. The story wasn't about collecting shadows—it was about what lives beneath them.

"You're doing that thing again," my sister said when she called. The thing where I disappear into a sentence for hours.

"I'm trying to find the right door," I told her.

"Just pick one. You can always pick a different door tomorrow."

She was right, of course. But admitting it would've required effort I didn't have. We talked about her garden instead—the tomatoes were early this year, already climbing their stakes like they had somewhere important to be.

After we hung up, I wrote three pages. Not about the shadow collector anymore. About a woman who plants tomatoes in March and discovers they bloom at midnight. The words came differently this time—not forced through a sieve but pouring through an open gate I'd forgotten to look for.

The story won't be finished tonight. Maybe not this week. But I found the beneath part, the place where the real thing grows. Sometimes that's enough. Sometimes the searching is the better half of finding.

Outside, the evening light slanted through the blinds in amber bars. I saved the file and watched the shadows lengthen across my desk, collecting themselves without any help from me.

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