One day I won’t make it to work and somebody will come to my room to look for me. They won’t find the body of a quiet guy who set aside few few dollars a week and inexplicably left a few million dollars to his alma mater. They’ll find my peaceful body and my stories.
Every morning for as long as I can remember I wake up with the sun and write a story. Actually, that’s not quite right. The story comes out of me. I’m just the vessel. I really have no idea how it works. It just happens.
Like I was saying, they’ll find the body and pretty soon they’ll forget about it and look at the walls. I attach the pages to the walls with library paste. For some stories, I need to stand on a ladder to read them. They are everywhere.
Are they good? I don’t know. But they will be all that will be left of me. I think maybe they are all there ever was of me. Who else could I be?
I’m a file clerk or a bus driver or a token clerk. Whatever. I’m a friend, a spouse. I’m family. What does that even mean?
There are only the pages, thousands of them—no, tens of thousands. The stories they tell, I’m not in any of them and yet they are me. My life and my fiction are one thing, but the stories are the bigger part.
You might think I’m a freak, but we all tell ourselves stories. We make up stories to explain things we don’t understand. And then we believe them, we repeat them, we become attached to them. We define ourselves by the stories we make up about ourselves and we sell those stories to the world.
Well, maybe not ‘we.’ My stories don’t go out into the the world and I don’t believe them. They stay in this room.
Oh, look. The sun! It’s coming up! I feel a new story welling up within.