Ink-Stained Mornings

 Every morning, Maira woke up before the city did.

The kettle sang softly as she prepared her tea, its steam curling into the quiet like a secret. Outside, the windows breathed in the hush of the wind, the streets still half-asleep. Her desk waited for her patiently—or maybe it was just her laptop, already smudged with fingerprints and yesterday’s doubts, ready to be opened again.

Once, she believed writers were born knowing what to say in their first drafts. She imagined words arriving fully formed, sentences obedient and confident. Time, however, taught her otherwise. Writing was not a gift handed down intact; it was learned slowly, stubbornly, through hours of uncertainty. Writers, she realised, were simply people who sat down with doubt and stayed longer than most.

Some mornings, the words came too fast. Her fingers raced ahead of her thoughts, sentences spilling out messy and unkind, as if demanding to exist no matter the cost. Other days, the screen stared back at her blank and unblinking. A single sentence would hover in her mind, fragile and unsure, only to disappear the moment she tried to type it. On those days, she deleted more than she wrote. Still, she stayed.

She learned that showing up mattered more than feeling inspired. Stories, after all, were shy creatures. They recoiled when chased too hard, hid when demanded. They appeared only when she loosened her grip—when she wrote without expectation, without asking them to be perfect.

Most people never quite understood that writing was never really about finishing the manuscript or reaching the final page. It was about returning to the desk the next morning, tea growing cold beside her, cursor blinking patiently. It was about trying again—despite the doubt that filled the room, despite the fear that today might be another empty page.

And so, every morning, before the city remembered how to speak, Maira wrote.
Not because the words were easy, but because she believed that if she stayed long enough, they would eventually come looking for her.