prologue, or the end of all things

Fiction. First written on 10th October, 2018.

Isn’t it funny that starting things is easy, but finishing them is hard?

I fondled this sentence in my mind as I dug through a cardboard moving box filled with half-finished notebooks, calendars with elbaorate plans that never came to fruition, planners with complicated schedules that were never followed, notebooks full of novels and short story collections that in the later pages became shopping lists and collections of addresses. Presumably the notebook had been repurposed after the author’s inspiration had run upon the jagged rocks of ‘Having a Job’ and ‘Paying the Rent’. In either case, there is always, in the last empty pages of those notebooks, the promise to return and finish the work,

It is at the bottom of this box of unfinished dreams that I locate this notebook. I no longer recall the details of how I came to acquire it. Standard black, softcover, moleskin. One can only imagine it happened in a fit of inspiration that later faded and the notebook - with my name and contact details and the promise to pay $100 as a lost and found reward was consigned to gather dust at the bottom of a box.

Since my time here, in this apartment, in this city, in the Shadow of the capitalist utopia of the City is slowly but surely coming to an end, now is as good a time as any to repurpose this notebook as a collection of pieces about what happened to me here, in this city, and during my time working for the Corporation.

I will be working from memory and from the few diary entries and notes I took while working there, so things will be for better or worse be seen in the light of memory that fades some parts and sharpens others. It will remain to be seen which parts fall into the latter and which into the former - there are lots of boxes in the dusty attic of the brain that I have not examined for a long time.

In spite of my ever-so-present dream of becoming a published author, I don’t expect this text to ever land on any editor’s desk, but in the unlikely event that it does, I would ask, you, the reader to please exercise care with the people whose depictions I have rendered on the pages within. For my own record keeping and due to the unlikelyhood of publication (even though one always secretly hopes) I will use real names throughout the text.

I suppose one should always finish these things with some profound sentence, leave the reader with a gift, a thought for the road, but I have none save for the one anxiety that haunts me day to day: time passes and we can do nothing but pass along with it.