WRITING EXERCISES TO DO IN THE DARK

An exercise in order:

Press the same letter on your keyboard over and over, in a constant rhythm. Do not speed up. Do not slow down. Press no other keys or buttons. Eventually, this practice will become soothing, meditative. You will feel the slightest strain of muscle where your finger meets your palm. You will feel the pressure against your skin rise and fall. You will want to close your eyes.

ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss

An exercise in chaos:

With one finger passing between three letters and a spacebar, type the phrase “uh oh”

Do not stop, and do not erase, but try to write as quickly as possible. You will feel your finger falling out of its perfect rhythm as you work, and once it has fallen, the return to rhythm becomes nearly impossible. Finally, you achieve it, only to watch it slip from your finger once again. You break a sweat in frustration, knowing what comes next.

uh oh uh oh uh oh uh oh uh oh uh oh uh oh iuh ohuh oh ujo h oh oh uh pou ubphoh oub oiu huhh oh uh kjbhoh h ihoh uho hiuh ohuh jo hiuj o hih nih jhiuh o hiuh uh uh hiohi huhi uhiu h hui h oh uh ihoh uh oh uh oh uh oh uh oh uh uoh uho huh ohuh j

At a certain point you will give up, but not as soon as you would have given up from boredom, had you not first fallen into chaos.

An exercise in holding:

Hold your fingers above the keyboard, millimeters from the surface of each letter. Count for thirty seconds. If your fingers touch the keys, restart the count. If they stray too high (and you will know when they do, as you will no longer feel the elastic pull of the letters), lower them again. You may recognize that the seconds will never reach zero. You may realize this isn’t worth your time.

An exercise in releasing:

Let all of the weight of your fingers rest upon the keyboard, tips to the letters “asdfjkl;”. Perhaps they are heavy enough to make false words on the screen. Perhaps they are not. Do not force them. Breathe.

dsklfaj

After each of my fingers gave in, all but my right pinky pressed hard enough against its letter. I focused deeply on that pinky. I focused on the weight it held between action and inaction.

An exercise in forgetting:

I typed in the dark, with light pouring out from my phone, with the last words I wanted to tell him. This, too, was a writing exercise, done only for myself.

Like I did, you should erase what you’ve written. Holding your right pinky on the button to delete, allow your cursor to skip over each misplaced letter, until everything is a flashing screen.

You did not want to see these letters anyway. They were merely an exercise. They were a path to something else.

An exercise in reminiscing:

Perhaps you will find you’d rather stay a while, and watch the words flicker over your newly opened eyes. Go ahead. I will not blame you.