I took a walk yesterday; not to anywhere particular.  Just a casual stroll through the woods, where the air was silent - as if the bird’s had lost their voices and the river refused to tell the trees’ its babbling stories anymore.  Even the usual sound of leaves brushing against each other, whispering, had completely vanished.  There was nothing to suggest that there was any life left on the planet apart from me.

For a moment, I considered the possibility that maybe I’d fallen victim to sudden deafness, or maybe it was one of those awfully silent moments before something huge and catastrophic happened.  I sure hoped it was neither, but as the twigs and branches broke without sound beneath my shoes, I decided that I had a slight preference to the first than the second.  

Yeah, that’s all I need now is a flash flood or an avalanche or a forest fire to make my day even better, I thought to myself, my mental voice dripping with sizzling acid.
  
I paused in my tracks, suddenly aware that I’d passed the same tree at least three times.  I craned my head around in owl-like fashion, searching for any clues that indicated which direction I had come from.  There was nothing.  Each corner of the forest looked the same as the last, choked with weeds and strangled thick with overgrown brambles and dull, pointless ferns.  Fear welled up in my throat, clogging my oesophagus like a bath-plug as an icy wave of fear washed over me, down to the very tips of my toes.  

Where the hell am I? Where did the path go? I asked myself frantically.  I spun around on my feet, helplessly prying for any hint of pathway, but the forest seemed to spin with me.  I felt as if I was trapped on a merry-go-round switched onto full speed, watching in horror as the forest merged into a single blur of browns, greens and greys, like the caged walls of a tornado twisting around me.

But then, somewhere in that muddy smudge of colours, I spotted a sliver of white peering through.  I froze, heart beating like a wild little bird, and darted towards it, ploughing my way through bushes and nettles as I went, ignoring each little sting as my eyes remained glued to my goal – safety.  I didn’t know what the tiny blots of white belonged to, but whatever it was it couldn’t belong to this wretched forest.  This wretched, lifeless forest.

I burst through the wall of overgrowth, undergrowth and every other direction of growth you can think of, a smile flowering upon my face – and fell onto rough, cold, marble-like concrete.  Ouch, I thought.  I hadn’t quite expected it to be so… hard.  I looked up to inspect my surroundings.  Neither had I expected everything to be so… so… grey.  It became clear to me, without much investigation, that I was still as lost as I had been ten seconds ago.

The street that I’d stumbled into wasn’t quite the typical association of the word ‘street’ that I had in mind.  Everything was, quite literally, a shade of unflattering grey or white, a little like stale, lumpy porridge.  The houses were white, their windows were white, and their doors were white, as if all colour had been sucked out of the world.  The flowers that grew in their gardens were dull and colourless, a bumble-bee’s living nightmare. The cars, the road, the sky… everything was white.  But not in the pretty, snowy, Christmas-card way – more as if the world had died and decomposed into nothingness, leaving nothing but its chalky bones behind.

Climbing to my feet, I scanned around for a sign of some sort that would maybe hint my location.  I found what I was looking for only feet from where I’d stumbled, poking out of the grassy sidewalk – “Writer’s Block”, it read.  I frowned, my posture slumping as if I were being pressed down by a huge finger.  I felt even more clueless, even more lost than before.  My mind was thick with questions, overflowing with thousands of little complications that simply existed to introduce complications into the way my thoughts were digested.  I felt as if there were a hundred brick walls between me and my goal, and the only way I could reach it was to punch my way through, bare-fisted and bloody.  

Impossible.  That’s how I felt.

Why was this place so depressing?  So lifeless?  So empty?  Why was this place such a blank canvas?

Suddenly, the spider-web of my mind caught a stray idea.  Blank canvas… that was it!

I swung around to catch my back-pack, quickly rummaged inside and pulled out the little wallet of art materials I carried with me everywhere.  Bingo!  My hands quivered with excitement, my mind racing with probabilities as my fists pounded and tore through each metaphorical brick wall that stood in my way.  

Then, all I had to do was start drawing.  

I flitted around like a bat that’d had just a little bit too much sugar with his dinner of worms and grasshopper, using my coloured pencils and felt tip pens to sling colour upon every possible surface there was.  I brushed life into each and every petal I saw, blessing each one with a new colour or pattern, so that they were the wildest looking flowers you’d ever see.  I dappled the lawns with a dozen shades of emerald and glimmering jade, and then drew bees, butterflies and ladybugs into the air to populate them and make little green cities out of them.

I painted the sky a delicious shade of blue, like bubblegum ice-lollies on a summery afternoon, then designed detailed Pterodactyls and winged-horses to glide across it – I even threw the odd witch on a broomstick, too, just to stick to tradition.  Then, I erased all the cars and replaced them with various, slightly more interesting vehicles – pogo sticks, hovercrafts, golf-caddy’s and the matter, to spice things up a little.  Upon the trees I drew fairy lights and Christmas ornaments, and in each window I sketched a little pumpkin, some with jolly, Santa-Claus expressions and others with more sinister, murderous glowers.

When I was done, I stood back to admire my work.  The street was decorated with the many riches and oddments, each pulled from the landscape of my imagination – it looked as if a Hippie’s treasure chest had been strewn across it.  I gazed around, grinning as I saw the never-ending line of dominoes I’d drawn along the pavements chase towards the unknown end, veering around lamp-posts and swirling around like a roller-coaster.  

“Oh, wait… almost forgot something,” I muttered to myself.  I skipped along the lawns towards the sign-post, pulled out my eraser, and quickly banished the word ‘Block’ into the attic of non-existence.  Neatly, loosely, I wrote the word ‘Crescent’ in its place.

Writer’s Crescent, I read.  “Perfect.”