The printers will not print. They have been jammed. They can no longer express what you send to them. They can no longer display your work.
What you mean to say, what you mean to be seen, is not coming out. It may appear as a series of colored blurs or a faded line or two. But the words cannot come out.
Just as when you hear keys clicking and clacking, you know that they are saying something, but it is impossible for you to decipher what. People are putting their thoughts down, making them concrete, but you do not understand them.
The keys do not sound out each individual letter or word, and the printer does not make every letter or word a different color. They cannot articulate what we are trying to say, out loud, to one another.
The keys liberate sound. The printer bleeds ink.
Blood mixes, and when tainted by it, your being becomes poisoned. Blood is the essence of our selves, and the essence of the printer from which are thoughts are marred and scratched, and from where our ideas descend out of our heads.
Is the essence of others what taints us? If our words bled from the page, we would all be tainted by those words. Would our lives be tainted, or our morals changed?
But can bleeding words really do that; can the essence of our heads really pollute each other? Or do we just wish that they would? Accept these ideas as our own, take credit and move forward. Or learn something from these leaking thoughts, although we did not have to think for them.
The curious looks that we give one another, out of the corner of our eye. Followed by silence. The look which can be interpreted and or mean many things, being a glance to see what they have said on their test, or one to mock important and attentive looks. But does this say more, or the silence?
The silence in which you dare not respond, or prompt their thoughts from their head into the air between you. A silence in which you dare not call them shallow, or call them out on that cheating glance. A silence in which you dare not mention them pulling their belongings closer, away from your eyes, and then back out again, as if correcting their mistake; as if the action of pulling it away was fixed by an offering through which you look around, just to make sure no one saw your selfish gesture. A silence in which you let their actions mill, and your words hang.
A silence in which you let the blood boil and cool, in an endless cycle. A silence in which you test one another, but almost unknowingly.
Widely un-recognized, seen as simply an awkward silence which they think they must fill.
And the looks cast around the room, to make sure their actions are in check. No one saw that did they? Am I right, or wrong? What do they all think? The never ending worry of a human being. Will they be tainted by each other the next day? Or maybe their words will not come out right . . .
In a silence that we dare not recognize. In an endless silence.