The writer

From his youth, the need to write consumed him. He would write in the margins of his notebooks, on coffee napkins and even on the walls of public toilets.

It was a miracle that he finished school and kept a job, given his mania for stealing paper to satiate his obsession.

Inevitably, he ended up in a mental institution. In his bare-walled white cell, he paced frantically in the yellowish light.

The doctors believed that the lack of pencil and paper would cure him, but they underestimated the voracity of his hunger for writing.

One day, when they opened the door, the walls were covered with scribbles of dried blood.

The patient, lying in a crimson puddle, bled to death as he scraped the last few sentences with his fingernails on the floor. Incomprehensible delusions and fragments of stories burned in his mind.

He was rushed for a life-saving transfusion. As he lay unconscious, hooked up to machines, his pupils moved frantically behind his eyelids, as if he were reading or writing in his mind.

The doctors assumed that the confinement had pushed him to this insane extreme. It never occurred to them that, for a true writer, words are as vital as the blood that carries them in his veins. To deny them to him is tantamount to slow agony.