Maybe

Maybe
He sat there writing away with a smile on his face and deep concentration in his eyes. He crafted each word on to the smooth clean paper. If there was not a pen in his hand his fingers would instead be tapping away at the keys of his computer. He was always writing, he wrote from when the milk was put on his doorstep in the morning till when the vomit was put on the doorstep of the student flat block across the road at night. Absolutely nothing would distract him from his work. Writing was his life, his job, a passion and a calling. It came before and after all else.
At that moment he was working a short story although by no means were stories his only creative outlet. Poetry, T.V., plays and articles and features for magazines, he did the lot and had much recognition in each field. The story he was writing at that time was one of his more light hearted pieces of work. It told the story of a famous explorer named Dr. Jonathon Nofearatallston who travelled the islands of the South Pacific with only his over energetic cocker spaniel named Rumper for company. He wrote down his words quickly but still seemed to put so much care into each of them. Nofearatallston had just rescued the surfing chief of one of the islands from certain death. The chief had been given a surf board by an evil Shaman who told him it was capable of surfing the lava of an erupting volcano. However the board was not magic, it was an assassination attempt on the chief. The doctor had discovered the plot and stopped the chief in the nick of time. For his actions he was given the shaman’s personal islet and the chief’s most beautiful daughter to marry, while Rumper was given the Shaman’s chicken collection to ‘play with.’
The writer finished the first draft of his story and jotted down an idea for a sequel where Rumper dies in one of his over energetic escapades and Nofearatallston tries to find a way to raise the pooch from the dead. The writer felt hungry so he decided to break for lunch. He always made sure to eat well as to keep his creative batteries charged up. He found this extremely helpful for stream-lining his writing and very rarely missed a meal. He placed his pen down on the page, got up and walked to the kitchen to fix himself some food.

The window to the writer’s study was forced open from the outside although he could not hear it from down the hall in the kitchen. A man pulled himself carefully halfway through the window but then fell through the other side rather clumsily and landed straight on the floor. He reached for the side of a table to help himself up but only succeeded in knocking a lamp. He tried to grab it with one hand but only managed to awkwardly knock it back up in the air. Luckily, when it came down a second time it landed around his chest and he was able to clasp it with both hands. This time he independently picked himself up, carefully put the lamp back where it had been and sneaked over to the writers desk. He read the story that had just been written. He was jealous at every aspect of it; the humour, the character building, the action and the twists. The excellence of everything about it made him gasp. He pulled open the desk drawer and found a twelve pack of condoms with only five remaining and a phone with seven missed calls on the display.
“Jesus Christ, he’s only been gone five minutes.” he said quietly to himself. He also found a wad of acceptance letters from magazines and newspapers for short stories and articles.



The writer was taken aback by the steam when he took the lid off of his cooking pot. He poured the contents into a colander then when all the water had drained through he spooned his food onto a plate. He picked it up and turned towards the kitchen table. When he rotated around he couldn’t help but drop the plate and have it smash to pieces on the floor when he saw the man standing in his kitchen doorway.
“Whaaat… the fuck?” were the only words the writer was capable of. Whereas the steam from the saucepan had taken him aback, this nearly knocked out his entire nervous system. He was not afraid as such, he was amazed and perplexed but most of all he was curious. Standing in front of him was the mirror image of himself except that the man was a little less well kept, to pull a punch or two. He had a few days growth on his face, which was very rough stubble, his clothes looked like rejects from an orphanage in Africa and his hair mushroomed out at the top then grew down to neck length unstyled and untamed.
“Who are you?” asked the writer.
“I’m you.” replied the scruffy man.
“Shut the fuck up.”
“I am you. Well, you are a part of me. You are just a figment of my imagination. You aren’t real, your stories, your poems even your life all just exist inside my head. Put there to torment me.”
Fear was now definitely one of the writer’s prevalent emotions.
“You better start explaining yourself seriously or I will call the police. Are you my twin because that is the only logical explanation I can think of?”
“ONLY thing you can think of, YOU, with that brilliant creative mind of yours can’t think of anything else? You’ve never been short of ideas before, how could you only think of one possible conclusion?”
The writer stood there unsure of what to do as the scruffy man began pacing and continued talking.
“I am an aspiring writer. I have never had anything published. My notebooks contain contain about a million stories of which about five are finished. When I say finished I use the term loosely. Every morning I wake up and think ‘today is day I will begin to start taking my writing seriously.’ Then I see you in my mind’s eye, writing away busily, undistracted… happily…” he smiled but also almost choked on the word. “… I see you putting your full commitment into your work and I think ‘That is how it is going to be from now on. No more excuses, no more distractions; I am going to become the writer I’ve always dreamed of being.’ But then, I make one excuse. Soon after, I make another, I put it off for ten minutes, and then twenty, then an hour until soon it is time to go to work. In the office I think about all the writing I’m going to do when I get home. However in the evening, I cook myself dinner, if you can call a microwave cooking. I watch T.V alone for hours. All the while there is a voice inside me screaming at me to write. But I just ignore it until it is time to go to bed, alone.”
The scruffy man hunched down by some glass sliding doors that led to the garden and stared out deep in thought. The two of them stayed in a kind of silent limbo for the next few minutes as the writer thought of something suitable to say. Finally, he made a suggestion.
“Why don’t you go out with your friends? Get socializ….”
“Haven’t got any friends.”
“Oh right, anyway go out talk to some strangers, make them your friends. This will make you happier and therefore put you in a better frame of mind to start taking your writing seriously.”
“I would like to but I find it really hard to have a conversation with someone I don’t know. It takes me awhile to get comfortable around someone but by that time they usually have the idea that I’m a loner, that I am weird and introverted. They don’t take the time to get to know me, but that isn’t fair on them. I can’t go around thinking I’m some kind treasure chest that only certain people who take the time and have the skill would be lucky enough to unlock. If I want people to like me I should show them what I am really like but I just can’t seem to come up with anything to say when I first meet people. I get on well with the people I work with but, you know, they’re work friends. They have their own lives outside of work.”
“Even so, see if any of them would like to have pint after work. It would at least be some social interaction. I remember I made some good friends when I worked at this delivery company a few years ago. It was just before I got my break in writing. It was at some godforsaken place, oh what was the name of it again?”
“Package Pulverisers?” said the scruffy man answering the rhetorical question.
“Yes! It was awful, sooo boring and soul destroying, did you work there too?”
“I still work there.”
“My god, how long has it been? How have you not gone insane?... I’m sorry I shouldn’t of said that.”
“That’s alright, it has been five years and if I haven’t gone insane then I’d better start believing in some kind of god because my boss Victor…”
“Victor, that dickhead” said the writer interrupting. “I told him to shove his job up his arse after two months.”
“I bet that felt good.”
“Yes, yes it did” said the writer smiling to himself as he reminisced on the sweet moment. He then continued “Tell me did Victor ever come out as gay, I always had my suspicions?”
“No, you remember Margaret the secretary?”
“How could I forget something that size” said the writer shuddering as he pictured her sour greasy face.
“They got married and even have a three year old girl now.”
“Sorry to be ignorant but that must be an ugly baby.”
“Well they entered her in a toddler beauty pageant last year and all she got was a medal for ‘taking part.’”
They both shared a laugh and the writer saw his new friend smile meaningfully for the first time.
“That kind of proves that we are the same person, I still don’t believe for a second I’m imaginary. Sorry, I interrupted you. You were saying something about Victor shouting at you?”
“Yes, he was shouting at me for messing up a delivery. A T.V got sent to the wrong address and the people who got it were refusing to give it back. His face had gone purple and his speech was incomprehensible when suddenly my eyes went blank and I heard a voice say ‘Come and see you hero.’ With that I was stood outside your window staring in at you while being filled with this envy of you and pity on myself. It is not that I want to be someone else, I wouldn’t change who I am for anything. I just want to become better and to fulfil my potential because I know I have bucket loads of it and a lot of fight. But I’m lazy and I lack discipline, I know what my problems are but I seem incapable of even trying to fix them.”
“I still can’t believe that my whole life is imaginary, that it exists only inside your head. What I think is that when I quit my job at Package Pulverisers and you stayed our universe split into two different parallel worlds. With me taking a chance and it paying off and you afraid to do so.”
“That might be possible or maybe I’ve just finally gone insane.”
“I might be crazy and you might be imaginary.”
“One of us might not exist or perhaps neither of us does.”
“Possibly one of us slipped into a coma. As interesting as this is I think the reason you are here, wherever here is, is for help. Help to start you writing better and help you to put in the hours of commitment necessary to become a successful writer.”

The writer suggested that they might be more comfortable in the living room where he had an open fire. The writer showed the scruffy man where it was then went back to the kitchen for a second. Scruffy fell back into an armchair and immediately started slouching. The writer came back with two bottles of beer, he handed one to his guest, placed his on the ground and lit a fire of chopped logs and coal. By the time the writer had lit the fire and sat in the chair opposite Scruffy, he had already opened his bottle.
“You don’t like waiting around.” said the writer.
“Not when it comes to drinking.”
They clinked bottles together and said cheers.
“Well, we both like drinking anyway.” said Scruffy with the low, forced laugh of a depressed man.
The writer gave him a look which Scruffy knew well so he asked him about it.
“The way you just looked at me. It’s the way I look when I think of my younger self. The thoughts and ideas I had when I was younger, that I really believed in, seem so foolish now. I can’t believe I thought like that but one thing I have held on to is the desire for great achievement in my life. Maybe that is another foolish dream I should give up on and that I should except my lot in life.”
“It is not foolish, but it isn’t easy. You have to be as persistent as erosion to get anywhere. That look I gave you was about drinking, while I take the odd drink I never, under any circumstances, get drunk anymore. I used to get twisted every weekend but soon after my twentieth birthday I started blacking out almost every time I got drunk so I decided to stop. To be honest, I never really liked drinking anyway, I only did it because there was nothing else to do and it was what everyone else did. I often think that a lot of the people who go out to pubs the whole time don’t even enjoy it themselves. Do you still drink a lot?”
“Every weekend without fail.”
“Do you ever blackout?”
“Every weekend without fail.”
“Wait, I thought you didn’t have any friends?
“I don’t I go out and get badgered by myself. I sit in the pub talking to no one.”
“Does blacking out, not remembering the entire night not scare you?”
“Shitless. With no one around to tell me what I have done I wake up worrying I might have hurt someone or myself.” Tears billowed in his eyes as he struggled to continue. “A…. a …a few weeks ago I was drinking in this bar and I blacked out. Next thing I know I’m trying to wake up and I think I am in my bed so decide to stay asleep then a voice a voice inside my says ‘Wake up, you spastic!’ really viciously. I opened my eyes and I was in the backseat of a car I had never seen before after pissing on myself. I was on my own in the car, so I got out and I was in a car park off a street I’d never been before. If I had turned left down that street who knows where I would have ended up? Luckily I went right and that brought me onto a road that happened to be on a bus route that goes near my house. I got on the bus, went home and fell asleep. When I woke up in the morning I noticed some marks on my arm. They… they looked like syringe marks. I don’t remember the night and I know if I was in control I would never in a million years touch heroin or anything like that but, when I blackout I don’t know what I’m like. I might be a completely different person. I mean…” His tears were then free flowing. “What if I have aids or something? What will I do? How will I tell my family? They’ve been so good to me over the years and all I do is treat them like crap. I never call and whenever they do I’m always in a rush to get off the phone. I can never say I love them even though I want to sooo BADLY. What the fuck is wrong with me? Why can’t I be the person I want to be? The person I’m capable of being. What is stopping me doing things that should be easy? What is stopping me being happy?”
Scruffy held his head in his hands as the writer tried to contemplate an answer.
“The first thing you’ve got to do is to get tested. It’s probably nothing, will put your mind at ease and if you have caught something your better off knowing as soon as possible.”
Scruffy nodded.
“Next, stop drinking. Getting drunk for you is very dangerous and could cost you your life, it might have already. If drinking gives you these kinds of worries and if you can’t remember one bit of the night then it can’t be worth it. Can it?”
Scruffy stared into the fire as it cracked and popped, he knew what his friend had said was right and had told himself the same things many times. He still doubted he had strength to do what was required. He looked at the bottle in his hand. He thought about standing up, smashing it to pieces on the floor and proclaiming that he would never let a drop of alcohol past his lips again. He thought about it but he did not do it as he knew this grand gesture would mean nothing to himself or the writer. Instead he placed the bottle on the ground in such a way leaving the two of them knowing he would not drink from it again. It wasn’t a war cry against his problems with alcohol but it was a start and at least it had some meaning. He could say a lot of things there and the writer could offer all the advice in the world but the real test would come when he got back to his life and had to face the temptation of day-to-day living. That would be the time for battle to begin. The writer performed the same action with his bottle as a show of solidarity. The two men smiled at each other.

They sat silent for a few minutes. The writer threw another couple of logs on the fire and said “If you and I are the same person apart from me having moved forward with writing as a career and you staying stuck in that rut that I was in a few years ago then you must feel the same way I do when I have a pen in my hand? Lost in your own world?”
“You mean, like this is the one thing you could picture yourself doing for the rest of your life, that anything else would count as failure. I; excuse me, we feel elated, calm, and we block out everything. There is no worrying about anything not work, health, rent, people, women or any other problems we have facing us. Our stories lead us on an emotional rollercoaster but happiness is always the prevailing emotion, no matter what subject we write about.”
“Couldn’t have put it better myself. I really think that your problem is a lack of discipline and direction. Join a writing group, start a course or both. Try to have fun with your writing. Put whatever wacky idea comes into your head down onto a page and forget about trying to get published for the moment. Relax and enjoy your writing because that will bring out your best. Let the words flow and see where it leads you. Meet some people who share the same interests as you. You live in London for God’s sake. There is eight million people in it of course there is some more like you out there. Not everyone likes to go out and get fucked up all the time. Finally, a risky move but it pushed me to where I am today, quit your job. It is soul destroying, de-motivating and does your writing no good. Nothing will make you write more than necessity, you’ll worry about rent and things for a while but it will work out plus you will have an unbelievable sense of freedom.”
“This has been really helpful. I think it is time I started pushing myself and not be afraid to take chances. My worst fear is being sixty and thinking ‘What if?’ There are too many people like that out there.”
“Are you feeling ok now?”
“Hmmp… maybe.”
“That’s all you can ever wish for.”
“I’ll definitely write about this experience.”
“Make sure you class it as fiction or you might end up in a mental hospital.”
“I wouldn’t have to worry about the rent then. Anyway I can write it as non-fiction, all I have to do is say it was a religious experience. That will make people believe anything. Who knows? Maybe this does have something to do with God.”

Scruffy snapped out of it to see Victor still screaming his head off at him. His face and bald head were still purple and Scruffy suddenly noticed how ridiculously funny this small, bald and stumpy man looked. He burst into a gleeful giggle which he was unable and unwilling to control. Victor then exploded even more which only caused more laughter. He finally stopped laughing and said “Fuck this place and fuck you. I’m out of here.”
Victor screamed after him “Where the fuck are you going!? Don’t you walk away from me you little shit!”
“I’m going to get shaving blades and a haircut.”
“Are you crazy?”
“Maybe, but the good kind of crazy not the stab, stab kind, more like the ‘c’mon let’s see how man apples you have to throw at an elephant before it’ll chase you’ kind.” He said just before he kicked his way out the offices swinging doors.