Ghost Writer

There was once a writer who found that he, after a few million words over the course of twenty odd years, could no longer write.  Sure, he could write.  If he sat down and smoked a pack of cigarettes and twiddled with whatever forced garbage he made himself lay upon the page, but at the need of the night—highlight and delete.  Would he like to save the changes he made to Untitled Document?  No, he would not.
He didn't think it would bother him as bad as it did.  And it hadn't bothered him, at first.  He figured that it would be back—it liked to take a vacation every now and then.  But it had been nearly a year, and he was still sitting with his fingers laced in his hair, wondering what was wrong.  It could be numerous things.  Stress, perhaps.  But he'd been under stress before, shit, some of his best work was done under stress.  Could it have been the drugs, the alcohol?  He'd been having a hard time lately just getting through his day without some kind of dope.  
He filled is life with distractions—video games, petty repairs to his house, video games,  check the email, refresh, check the email.  Anything to pass the time until it came back.  But now he was beginning to get worried.  If it was a friend, or a family member, he would go out looking for it, driving down darkened highways, then driving on until morning, checking the haunts and dives and old girlfriends' houses.  But of course it wasn't like that.  All he could do was wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.  Wait until it came back or until he died.
About every other day or so, he would sit and look at the blank screen, like a widow who looked out on the crashing waves from her perch high above a cliff, until she gave up hope, fell forward, and became a ghost that may or may not really be there anyway.