Page 36 of Breakout Year

Akiva

Writing was—

Writing was?—

Writing wasn’t happening.

There were pages that were blank with possibility and pages that were blank with emptiness, and Akiva knew which one he was facing.

He’d ticked all his to-do boxes. Coffee, run, shower, daven, emails, emails, emails, emails . The small, smart, boring decisions that made up his day, that left him with a bad aftertaste no amount of coffee would wash out.

On a video chat, Sue called him glum.

Over text, Mark reminded him about Shabbat dinner.

Take the money, Akiva begged.

Bring some wine , came the response.

He quit trying to write, got in his car, drove to his parents’ house.

Their old house. It used to be white with green trim.

Now it was a color that was neither yellow nor tan, an unobtrusive paint job that made Akiva want to egg the place.

The developers probably put in greige vinyl flooring like every other flipper.

They probably thought of a kitchen with two sinks as an oddity and not a necessity that came from separating your milk dishes from your meat ones.

My parents lost all that because of me .

He gripped the steering wheel until his knuckles pulled white. If he held onto that, he wouldn’t do something foolish like dial Eitan’s number. I could be getting paid to ? —

Eitan said his parents couldn’t put a price on certainty, but uncertainty, as Akiva knew, came with its own costs. Was there a price he’d put on the glowing feeling in his chest he got whenever Eitan called—a part of himself Akiva would have to sell to make rent?

When in doubt, throw someone from a train.

He tried not to feel like that had already happened to him: being tossed from a train emotionally and making hard impact.

In books, you could cut away from a character getting up, brushing gravel off themselves, testing for a twisted ankle or a bruised knee.

You could edit out the grind of everyday living.

Not here. Here came slow and unexciting, and it was funny how the right decision was so often the one that made you feel the worst.

So he turned on his engine and slowly navigated home to confront a blank page he didn’t know how to fill.