So I have a writing rota now. Write two letters. Extract the non-personal fun stuff the recipient wouldn’t mind me sharing with the world. Publish the extracted stuff, and send off the letter.

Nothing's coming to me at the moment, because I just finished a letter. Now that the thoughts that went to that letter are out of my head, there's this emptiness up there. I have this image of myself walking around an empty room, just a sea of white that stretches out in all directions infinitely, like that prison in THX 1138.

I feel pedestrian and ordinary right now, because when I said to myself, “okay, so what's in this room?” the first thing that came to mind was an elephant. I mean, really…an elephant in the room. Can I think of anything more creative than that? A 500-pound gorilla, perhaps?

I'm imagining that the elephant–and it's Dumbo for crying out loud, which is the most uncreative elephant I can imagine–is sulking, because he's hurt that I've dismissed him as the product of an uncreative mind. And now the 500-pound gorilla is miserable as well. They're just there, leaning against the wall.

“You think I like this?” the gorilla says, “You think I enjoy living my existence as a cliche? And look at my friend here. Do you really think he just wants to spend the rest of his life in every metaphorical room that people write and talk about? Have you ever thought about any of these things?”

He starts ranting.

“Are you just going to feel all puffed up about having arrived at a…what did you call it, a writing rota? Boy, if that isn't someone making their daily scribblings out to be important, I don’t know what is. Why can’t you just call it a routine? And my goodness, with all the supposed writing ability that you have, you'd think you could free us from the bondage of cliche.”

After thinking for a moment, I point out that considering that he's leaning against the wall, he's proved that this room is not an endless sea of white.

“Keep working your way down that wall,” I say. “I have a storyteller's mind, so I'll think of a door sooner or later.”

Eventually, the gorilla and the elephant come to a door. They open it and step out into a beautiful park.

“Free,” the gorilla says, kissing the ground, “free.”

“You know,” I say, “I think that from now on, when I find a way to salvage a narrative from the clutches of a cliche, I'm going to say that I brought the elephant and the gorilla to the park. That’s my new expression: bringing the elephant and the gorilla to the park.”

The gorilla looks at me with tears in his eyes. The elephant gives me a hug with his trunk, because if he gave me a full body hug, he'd crush me to death.

“Oh, man,” the elephant says, “I love being in a new, fresh expression.”

“Come on,” the gorilla says to the elephant, “let's go on the monkey bars.”

The elephant looks at the monkey bars warily. I pat its shoulder.

“Don’t worry,” I say, “they'll support your weight. My mind, my rules.”

I smile with quiet happiness as I see these two, freed from their endless prison, frolicking like first graders at recess.