Unrealistic Expectations

She lay in bed, propped up by a quartet of pillows, while her cat snoozed at her feet. The glow of the laptop coupled with the string lights wrapped around her bookcase and strewn throughout the miniature fir tree, and cast a soft glow that staved off the shadows of twilight. Tap, tap, tap… her fingers flew across the keyboard, generating the words she so frequently thought but rarely said. Others called it “writer’s block,” but she knew better. It was self-criticism. The stories she had to tell just weren’t that important, or they were badly constructed. Her brain-to-paper connection was out of sync; she never chose the right words, or she lacked the vocabulary to explain the perfection of the image in her mind. Yet, there she sat tap, tap, tapping away.

She glanced at the door for what had to be the hundredth time in the last few hours. Other tenants came and went down the hallway just outside it, ascending and descending the narrow stairs to the street below. Dozens of pairs of feet, and none of them belonging to the person she hoped would show up on her doorstep that night. But men don’t just arrive at a woman’s apartment with some excuse about how they “couldn’t wait to see them” unless it’s in some cheesy, unbelievable movie. She sighed dejectedly, annoyed at her romanticism.