My laptop will be leaving me tomorrow. It has a small crack in the palm rest and I am sending it away to be fixed. I have been told it will take seven to ten business days, though all they have to do is pop off the top case and put a new one on. This cannot be done at my local Apple Store—I must send it away. What is seven to ten business days in real time, up to two weeks? In writing time, how many possible pages? In goof-off time, who knows.

It’s such a small thing, the crack. I am looking down at it now and it barely seems worth it. Then again, I am paranoid ever since my last laptop died on me, and I don’t want this small thing to turn into an enormous thing that causes the computer to implode years from now and I’ll have run out of the warranty and I’ll look back on this day and think, Couldn’t I have spared the two weeks? Really, such things happen.

Also, I might as well get it fixed now—while I am stuck creatively. If I am in the midst of a novel later I won’t want to let the computer go.

So, what does this mean, not having a computer for that long?

It means that if I want to write I will have to write… on paper.

I don’t know why I’m so weirded out by it. It’s not like I haven’t written solely on paper before. I mean, seriously, that’s how I started. I did not always have the sleek convenience of my Mac OS with its quick-thinking little brain and its soft keys and its many, many distractible elements that more often than not see me NOT writing instead. These two weeks could be really refreshing. It’s possible. I honestly have no idea what it feels like to write in the pages of a notebook anymore. I hope I haven’t forgotten how.