Where We Were

We were all in a familiar place, physically. Mentally, I was in the most foreign of places. Lifted by my many vices, embellishing the parts of myself that I feared the most.

Comfort was overshadowed by something nameless and I didn't care to name it.

But she was there to tell me its name. It was called drama, narrative flourish, a skill in one world and an embarrassment in another. In the world we were in, in that bakery and in that bar, it was an embarrassment. Take it to that other world, she said.

There was a man, she told me, that had been afraid of his talent for drama and wild emotions. She told me that I should devote myself to fiction writing because, clearly, I had the capacity to live many lives even as myself. Imagine the lives I could live as others.