This was an accidental story.  Well, I supposed they all are when it comes down to it.  A stray thought unconnected to the events around you, an overheard snippet of someone’s conversation, a glimpse of graffiti passed in the car—

Or, while in a towel ironing my shirt, the sudden image of a distraught man sitting along at the bar.

“It stung.  He pretended not to notice, but knew anyone could see his grimace/cringe.  He didn’t want it.”

I had to grab the first piece of paper I could find; an envelope, and get that one short paragraph that followed down in writing, into the real world, and out of my head before the memory of the words was twisted out of its original shape and lost.  That’s the danger here—it’s the dance with the devil every writer attempts, to repeat the piece of perfection (or so we believe it to be) again and again in our mind because we believe we’ll remember it forever and be able to write down later.  We won’t.  We never do.

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So, standing in a damp towel, the iron forgotten about in the other room, I wrote against the ticking clock of my flawed short-term memory.  And I found myself at the start of a story I’d never intended to tell, one I didn’t think there’d be a reason to tell; of what drives a man to take his own life, of what events come together to crush someone who was always relied on, always envied as being the strong one, the successful one, the one who got all right?  What does it take for him to realize that man doesn’t exist?  Not in fictional stories or the real world.

But not everyone realizes that.  Some believe he does exist.  Some believe they are that man.  Only the idea of that man has ever existed, and it’s when he realizes that, that he finds himself more alone then he had ever imagined possible, ordering a drink he doesn’t want, to forget the events and the people that brought him there, trying to find some comfort at the end of his world.