He parted the dirt for the first time out of what must be well over a thousand breaks at this bench and buried an apple core, normally he would dispose of it inside but he wanted to see if it would sprout remember to water it tomorrow. Ner still hadn't responded so he text her again "sorry, I'm really tired too, can I see you tomorrow?". Ast didn't want to see her tomorrow but it was simply a means to not have to deal with patching things up with her right now, it allowed him to delay it and left the problem for his future self. Ast's main priority right now was finishing his poem about his boss, he thought that he could confidently be satisfied with it this afternoon and then his mind would be clear to figure out a way to fix things with Ner tomorrow. Ner was not aware that anything did need fixing between them, she was indeed losing interest but felt that her absence over the last two days was completely unrelated to him, she was stressed and had been calling sick to work and spending the days in a drunken bender after being reminded of her late brother from seeing a character in a tv show who looked vaguely similar. Ner almost instantly responded "yep, come to mine xx, have a lovely day at work, I'm just doing some gardening". Ast didn't reply, he went back to his office, got his actual work out of the way for the day and then after lunchtime he returned to working on his poem realising he had spent the whole morning on it and only decided on one word 'humans' and even that was subject to change.

Should I name my characters? perhaps it's better not to, it would create a bit of mystery, names have all sorts of unintended effects, people might see a name they recognise and subconsciously be influenced because of someone they know with that same name. I guess it doesn't matter if they are influenced in ways I don't want them to be as long as they feel something. That influence can also be used to your advantage though, names also have intended effects, you can name them after some famous person or even some object/theme, there are no rules, well you can choose what rules you value. But what if you name them something to make a certain impression and then the passage of time or another piece of media tarnishes public perception of that name, it becomes out of your control, names aren't timeless but ideas are, it's like how I used to use the nickname 'Eleven' and then that show came out and added a lot of preconceptions to the use of it, they stole my name from me. Perhaps it's more poetic for something to not be timeless? to leave its mark on the world then to be forgotten or misunderstood by all those without the rare esoteric knowledge of the time in history that it came from. What sort of mark do I want this poem to leave on the world? I need to think of the overall story first before I get into details like names. The names could help define the story though? no, I need to work out what exactly I want to happen, names should only be a means to facilitate that rather than an idea in themselves. All that matters is that it is as poetic as possible and for that the key events are most important, any language choices are secondary, I know I don't have the conventional skills to have my work carried by nice language, I need to rely on the ideas.

Despite giving a great deal of thought to the word 'poetry', Ast still couldn't have eloquently articulated what the essence of poetry was if he was asked but he felt as if he could confidently say when one particular idea was poetic based on a vague subjective feeling. This was the guiding mechanism behind how he created his poems, or attempted to create poems since he never seemed to completely finish them, he would think through countless options without some real algorithm for refining the ideas then go off gut feeling alone as to what was more poetic, a brute force approach.

Two people have a bunch of meaningless interactions, they then have one meaningful interaction and this interaction becomes their last interaction of any sort, this is the core of my story. But why did they have this one meaningful interaction? was it chance like not meaningful? or was it determined like it was something they felt they had to act on without giving it a conscious consideration? if it was determined it might undermine the weight of the idea as if the interaction was inevitable and purely impersonal business. What if the meaningful interaction became the cause of the end of their interactions? similar to opening someone's eyes that they need to make a change in their life? This happens, quite a bit, surely? there are certain pieces of advice that hold more weight if they come from a stranger, because people who know you have a preconceived notion of who you are and think you belong in your current place in the world, there is a certain kind of unique honesty that can only come from someone who doesn't care about you. This sounds kind of poetic, the narrator, will I have a narrator? focuses on someone who is virtually a stranger to them, takes a 'guess' and tells their boss that they seem to be bored of their life and should go somewhere new, that story sounds too common, I don't want my poem to be common.

What about if they bonded on this meaningful interaction and now resolve to stay closer but then they are torn apart through no fault of their own. Say the boss really does have a sick family member, the employee steps in and offers an ear of support, they bond and realise they have more in common than they thought and resolve to finally see each other as humans, but the sick family member now needs permanent care so the boss has to move to support them and they never see the employee again. This is kind of poetic, they had years to form a relationship, they finally attempt to but it is too late through no fault except time itself. This story is also pretty common though?

Wait, what did I actually do? I thought about talking to my boss and checking to see if things were ok but didn't end up checking. I am still debating whether I should question him about it. What if I leave it too late? what if my character does that too, what if I decide tonight that I am going to try to talk to him, only to find out tomorrow that he has left forever? That seems poetic, it's like two different angles on the theme of time, on one level they could have become close years ago, on another now they cant ever become close if just for a moment. It would also have a certain type of irony, on some level it would be like the bosses sudden absence has now had a meaningful impact on the employee's life as a result of denying the employee the chance to have a meaningful interaction with the boss when they were finally ready to.

What if they think about questioning the unusual detail of the phone but eventually convince themselves it is of a perfectly ordinary explanation and not worth thinking about, they don't confront the boss or ask about the phone then it turns out the phone really was an indication of something significant. It would touch on themes of regret, of how you should trust your instincts, of the struggles in searching for meaning. It would be saying that even if you believe things are meaningless, meaning still happens all around you, it would be a rejection of nihilism 'stick a gun to a nihilist's head and then ask them if nothing matters', god, nihilists are the worst.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

Ast had such a hatred for nihilist's as he had struggled with nihilistic feelings in his youth and was a little self ashamed that despite his self denial of this fact, he still struggled with them to this day, he saw them as demon's within himself and not really him. In his youth he had indulged in these feelings too deeply and wasted many years of his life in stagnation, achieving very little, as such now he blamed nihilistic beliefs in general and the culture which romanticised them for his own lack of agency in his youth. He felt it was his moral duty to dispel nihilism wherever he could and help others find meaning in their lives, ignoring the fact that a large contributor to the level of depth of beauty and complexity that he now saw in the world was a consequence of the contrast to the years he spent in nihilistic suffering.

That's it, that's the most poetic version of this story, he instinctively feels like the phone on the desk isn't meaningful or important and that it's essentially random, he ignores his feelings and resorts to his logic. He learns that his first instincts were right, the boss had a dying mother, the boss leaves for their funeral and comes back too depressed to work, never truly regains his composure and settles for a more simplistic job elsewhere where his constant mental anguish isn't as much of an obstruction to more simple work duties. The employee will realise he doesn't know how to operate best in the world due to wrongfully siding with logic in this case and forever feels regret for not helping another similar soul through a period of suffering, that's poetic, nihilist's coming up against the brick wall that is objective reality and getting what they deserve, regret, fuck nihilists.

That's ok, we can go with that story, but I still think it's crucial to include the idea that they had thousands of interactions where it was possible to attempt to establish some meaningful connection between them which were never acted upon, how even in this final interaction where his soul was begging to search out the obvious meaning his feelings were denied. Yes, this idea is important too, He responded to his more distance voice, not just that one interaction, that last interaction needs to be given more depth through relation to thousands of other interactions precluding it, while in retrospect we know that each of those superficial interactions weren't hiding something more and that no real meaning was lost, we need to reference that they could have been meaningful. The idea that each and every one of those interactions presented a possible branch in their relationship and lives and even if a certain interaction or lack of interaction wasn't important, maybe he should have pursued all one thousand of these interactions regardless just to make sure he did confront his boss on that one inevitable meaningful day that might be their last together, would it have been worth it?

That sounds overly dramatic, do I need it to be dramatic? how would I make it more dramatic? perhaps I could change the characters and make it into a love story. Love stories are always the most meaningful, right? that's why almost every story is a love story, the problem with love stories is that everyone has a different interpretation of what love is, if you try to define it or specify it too much you end up alienating a bunch of readers with a different opinion on love. The key is to make the love as vague as possible, that's the whole appeal of love, the mystery about what it really is and how no one truly understands it. But I want this story to be specific?

How would I even do a love story for this concept? thousands of interactions then he finally goes to ask her out and she is gone, if it was love he could still chase her, maybe she died or got married, that's too dramatic that it would distract from the key premise. Plus, no one would like him if he let thousands of interactions with a girl he supposedly loves pass him by, virtually everyone over the age of sixteen knows that love waits for no one, that if you don't chase it you deserve to lose it. Maybe he only just realised he was in love? maybe but that undermines the love, love always hits you from the start, you might not know what it is you are feeling but you know you are feeling something unique right from the start.

I'm sure I could invent some situation where either through his unique psychology or the specifics of the situation he had valid reasons to not interact with her for years, or there was a reason why he suddenly realises what he felt the whole time was love. Maybe, but even with such a situation, it would require a lot of imagination on the part of the reader to put themselves into this unique situation, you don't want the reader to feel like they have to work to imagine your ideas and empathise with the character, you want it to be like a beautiful reciprocal dance between your words and their imagination. But some work is always required to get them to feel what you want them to? sure, but let's say you find a way to get them to believe he was right to ignore her for years and then chase her, is the story even fundamentally improved by it being a love story? I don't think so, I think the story is better the less objectively meaningful it is to the participants, the less dramatic, the more subtle.

The meaning doesn't come from what lead up to this point or the psychology behind the participants getting to that point, the meaning is contained within the events themselves and the effect they have on the participants. We only need to explain the lead up just enough to get the reader to be sympathetic with the participants, to feel like they could accidentally get themselves into a similar situation, it would require a lot of pointless effort for them to imagine they could not follow their love interest for years, it's easier to imagine getting stuck in a routine at work, to ignore someone on the periphery of your life who you have no real obligation to interact with outside a functional sense. Someone harder to imagine like the man who doesn't pursue their love interest although it sounds silly for me to think that because it's so common, is better suited to be developed and explained in a full novel or something.

Love would complicate it and distort the effect, it would distract people from his feelings that we want to convey, they would think the main thing he is suffering from is heartache, rather than the more specific emotion we want to convey. The emotion that he regrets discounting his own feelings and siding with faulty logic, the emotion that he never really got any resolve for all these interactions, that he can never close the chapter of their years together with anything meaningful, he will forever feel like those years of interactions were for nothing, now he questions if the whole past ten years of his life had any consequence or if he was hurtling without breaks to his inevitable demise, never achieving any real meaning in his ordinary life.

Ast was now feeling despondent from confronting his aging, he looked at the clock on his PC, it was now 4:32. Ast was the employee who had been with the company the second longest behind his boss and this came with perks, he could leave whenever after 4pm and his boss wouldn't mind. Ast decided he would head home early after staying late yesterday. He walked down past his bosses office and looked inside, something he would rarely do, he caught his boss tapping on his desk with both of his index fingertips, fidgeting as he stared at his screen, they exchanged their regular though rarely used choice in farewells since Ast would often leave without saying goodbye.