lost.

 

And you? they asked.  Who are you?  Why are you here?

 

I hadn't known what it was I should tell them.  The truth?  The lies I had made up in my fictions, in my mind, to keep myself happy and content?  Or something new, something that I had managed to fabricate in only a matter of seconds?  Did it matter?  Would they care?

 

I'm a writer, I finally told them, staring at my shoes.  That's all.  Nothing more.

 

Oh, they asked, are you here to take notes on us and put us in your stories?

 

I shrugged my shoulders, not looking at them.  I am here to see you, I told them.  I am here to judge and to create.  I'm here to take your images and your feelings and set them to paper.  It is all I am fit to do.

 

Surely you don't think that, they insisted, but their faces were blank and their voices were fake.  They didn't know me; they didn't know what their words implied or what they meant.  So I shrugged again and did not meet their eyes.

 

I don't know what I think, I told them.  I never do, anymore.

 

Of course you do, they said while they smiled.  Everyone knows what it is they do and what they mean; you can't be as lost as all that.

 

I am a writer, I told them, still not meeting their eyes.  I can never be like anyone else.  I will never be found again.

 

Who were you before you became a writer? they asked.  Were you a teacher, a preacher, a merchant?  Were you a businessman or a father?  A son?  A lover?  A husband?

 

I was nothing so great, I told them.  I have never been so wonderful as all that.

 

But you are a writer, they insisted.  That is wonderful, isn't it?

 

No, I answered, it is not.  I finally met their eyes and let them view me from the inside out.  I let them scrutinize and measure me; I let them examine me.  They became strangely unsettled with what they saw, and I wondered what it was that they were seeing.  Did they see my conflict and turmoil, my need to be something new and different, something I could never be?  Did they see the way I was reaching out for help and the way I was drowning in my own inspiration, in my own ideas, in my own stories?  Drowning in lives that weren't even really my own?  Did they see--could they see--the way I was becoming lost in stories, fabrications of life itself, the way I was forgetting who I was?  Did they know how I placed bits of myself into each and every story and that I lost a bit of myself every time I put the pen to paper?  Did they see they way I fretted, how I spoke to myself when no one else was around to hear me?  All writers speak to themselves, of course--just usually not aloud...

 

Oh, they said, we see.  They did not.  They did not see.  How could they see what I could not?

 

I was asked no more questions that night.