Things I Write When I Should be Sleeping

This is gonna be a slightly experimental exercise so bear with me a little. An exercise in BS. I'm gonna try writing a story here, a couple paragraphs at a time, with no forethought or planning, and see how it comes out. I'll just be making it up as I go along. One sentence at a time, not sure where the next sentence will bring me. I don't know how long the story is gonna be, but I'll try to write often and keep the story moving so you aren't all caught up in suspense. Now...

How did it start? I've been asked that dozens of times over the years. And I don't think I have any better understanding of it today than I did when it happened. It's just one of those things that happens sometimes. In a universe full of a billion, billion things, everything has to happen somewhere right? But I am avoiding the question. I guess I'll just tell you what I've told all those curious people over the years: it started at the beginning...

When I was a young man I never cared much for socializing. I was a social pariah, though few would believe me, by choice. Other people were little more than an amusement, a curiosity to be observed from a distance. I guess I was always a scientist at heart. Who was I to contaminate the experiment?

All this time to myself didn't go to waste though. I would spend hours playing in my own imaginary world, alone in the woods behind my mother's house. My father had abandoned us when I was born. Or drank himself to death, or joined a traveling circus. I could never get a real answer out of my mother. She never talked about him much. Or at least she didn't sober.

But in those woods, I was safe. They went on for miles, one of the last untamed pieces of land left in New America. I would fight dragons and warlocks. I would rescue princesses and discover hidden treasure. I'd stay out there for hours and then I'd come home and write it all down, reliving every exciting moment all over again.

I don't remember the specific day it happened; what I had for breakfast, what clothes I was wearing and the like. It's strange how we spend so much energy worrying about trivial things like food and clothes when it's the seemingly trivial things that linger in your mind the longest. And what are we if not a collection of memories?

I remember the way the cottonwood seeds hung in the air that morning, like the slowest snowfall you've ever seen. I remember seeing the tracks of some wild animal that I still have never identified. And I remember the smell. I think, in some small way, it has never truly left my nostrils in all this time.