The ideas had always come twice a year, approximately. Not scheduled, not predictable within the year, but averaging two: once in late summer or early autumn, once in winter or early spring. Sixty ideas across thirty years of conscious thought. Oryn had logged each one in a notebook he kept for no other purpose: the date, the domain, a brief description of what had arrived. The log was not a record of accomplishment. Several of the ideas had been wrong. Some had been partially useful. A handful had been genuinely productive. The log was a record of arrival: the thing had come, and he had been there to receive it.
Five months ago, nothing had come.
He was not, strictly speaking, underweight. But he had lost weight he had not planned to lose. He ate more than he used to, and the weight came off anyway. His doctor had run tests and found nothing remarkable.
What was absent was what he thought of as the clearance behind the sternum: a quality of space, of readiness, that he had lived with for so long that its absence felt like a physical removal. He had tried to describe it to his doctor. His doctor had noted it and done nothing with the note, which was the appropriate response because there was nothing to do with it medically.
He had tried to work. The work felt like eating bread that had no nutritional content. He chewed and swallowed and felt nothing but the mechanical process. The equations sat on the page and he understood them in the narrow sense of symbol manipulation and felt nothing else.
He had found his notebook from six months ago, a period of unusual productivity before the fast began. He had read his own handwriting and could follow the logic and felt certain, reading it, that it had been written by someone else. Not in the quality of thought. In the sense of proximity. The ideas on those pages were ideas he could no longer reach from where he currently was.
He sat at his desk. The page was blank. He was still waiting.