Fiction and Fact.

They say that life is stranger than fiction, don’t they? Well, sometimes it is, but very rarely.

For two days now I’ve been consumed with self-recrimination over my lamentable decision to turn down the offer to meet the person I have held in such high esteem for so long. And at times I fell to imagining scenarios which would save the day. She would knock on my door anyway and say: ‘You don’t get rid of me that easily, Jeff. I’m here, like it or not.’ I put words into her mouth and practiced my responses. Sometimes I even imagined it might actually happen.

It’s what comes of being a fiction writer. Things like that happen in fiction because anything can happen in fiction as long as it’s plausible. It’s what makes fiction entertaining and exciting and horrifying and upsetting and uplifting. Chance meetings, coincidences and random acts of determination happen routinely in fiction. And if you write fiction habitually, the line between it and the real world becomes blurred. It’s so easy to become persuaded that life is just another story in which the hopelessly improbable transcends all barriers of probability to bring the plot to a satisfactory conclusion.

Only it doesn’t happen that way. Real people rarely behave like their fictional counterparts. Chance meetings, coincidences and random acts of determination are very much the exception rather than the rule.

And so I smile through the anguish of self-recrimination because deep down I know there will be no knock on the door. I know I won’t look up from my garden chair to see a figure standing by the corner of my house watching me. I know that my practiced responses are no more than fantasies dissolving into the ether. And then living in the real world becomes tedious again and the grip of self-recrimination tightens.