I. Write. Fiction

I did not think to find her here, not in this corner coffee shop. She frowned to be discovered, but not enough to frighten me away. She, stirred her coffee thoughtfully when I sat down and then she said:

“You do remember what we’re doing, don’t you?”

“That’s the trouble,” I replied. “I don’t know any more. Is that why you left?”

She shook her head, sipped the froth from her spoon then pointed it like a weapon. “I didn’t leave,”she said. “I hid. There’s a difference. If I’d left you, you would never have found me again.”

“You hid?”

“Yes. So you’d come looking. And you did, so I forgive you.”

“I wish I could believe I’d never lose you.”

She turned her gaze to the window, to the street, and watched the crowds passing for a while. “How can you?” she said. “Since we’re the same, you and I.”

People walked by on the other side of the glass, barely inches away from us, self absorbed, unconscious of our presence. They looked hunched and worn – old clothes, cheap clothes, crumpled and wet from the day’s storms.We had once been such a proud and tidy people, we northern Brits. But the shops across the way looked so terribly tired now. Some were empty, some for let, notices of closure, none offered any hope of redemption or renewal. We had become a self-fulfilling cliché of decline. Yes, the town was dying. I only hoped we were not dying with it, that our fate was to survive it, bloodied and bruised perhaps, but somehow to transcend it, to move on.

“I ask again,” she said. “What are we doing?”

“I don’t know. We were writing.”

“No, I was for writing, you were for blogging. And everyone knows blogs are mostly bullshit. We do not pedal in bullshit, Michael.”

“No. Yet you seemed happy to go along with it all those years. Indeed, I recall the ideas for that blog came from you anyway. All my ideas come from you. And we do not pedal bullshit. We are sincere,… at least.”

She smiled, nodded in faint admission of her guilt. “Mostly that’s true. And I was happy with the blog. I am happy. Sincerity is a respectable defence, Michael. And not without merit. I forgive you.”

I thought I felt her melting, and sought then to press my advantage: “And weren’t we getting somewhere?”

My mistake. She frowned.

“You mean with all that surfing the fourth dimensional waves of space-time? Like anybody cares about that kind of stuff. They’re happy for it to be woven into a story, for then at least they can deny its reality. But we’ll never convince anyone of its fact when neither of us understand it either.

“Listen, Michael, our mission is much simpler than you’re trying to make out. You do know there’s nothing we can ever do, or say or write that will add anything to what we already have. In your blogging you forgot that. You fell into the trap of your own self importance. I know you know this is true – your last piece reflects it.”

So, she’d read it. That much at least explained her presence here today.  “Okay, so I killed the blog. Happy now? Can we move on?”

“I didn’t want you to kill the blog, stupid! I only wanted you to remember what it’s there for.”

“I took it too seriously, I know.”

“No, it’s more than that. Worse than that. What’s the first lesson we learned, long ago, when we were children, when we first began to write?”

“I don’t know. Knowing has always been your department. You tell me.”

“Write like no one is listening, except for the the one person who matters, and is always listening, regardless of what you write. Me. You write for me. To me. Through me. And. We. Write. Fiction. We invent realities. We do not pretend to know the ultimate nature of this one, for that is to second guess the gods who made us. And anyone who goes down that road is simply courting madness. Believe me, I should know. I am much closer to them than you are.”

The waitress brought my coffee. A sudden shower of hail rattled the glass. She commented on how changeable this April weather was. Then came a cold rush of air as the door opened and a figure took to the street, melting quickly into the crowd. The chair opposite was empty.

Gone again.

For now.

I took out the ‘Droid and began to write, slowly, dabbing like an infant at the screen. And I wrote:

I. Write. Fiction.

Thank you for listening.

(Well,…. that didn’t last long did it?)