A Story In Which Nothing Happens

It is not a love story. In fact, it’s barely even a story. You get bored thinking about it on a regular basis and feel the tiniest bit of guilt in the pit of your stomach when someone asks you to retell it. It’s just bad. There’s no structure and there’s no real beginning and the middle is a clusterfuck and did The End actually happen already? and you’re still too emotionally involved to tell it well and you’re also trying too hard to pretend that you couldn’t care any less, so your delivery is awful and you stutter at certain points and you mix up words and this is exactly why you write things for a living because it’s so much easier to hide behind.

But what happens is this: you two meet. It’s entirely nondescript, but weirdly you wrote about it in your diary — the one from The Second Best Time In Your Life. You included his first and last name, which is something you really only reserve for people you’re worried you’re going to forget about because they’re just background characters. You were wrong this time. If anything, you’d secretly like to forget it all anyway. You’re a sore loser.

You remember the night well though. You still wear that black dress, but you broke those sandals the following summer when you traveled to Europe during your existential crisis. You are constantly doing stupid things to cover up how uncomfortable you are. He was and is the type of person who, when you first meet, you feel like you’ve been friends for a couple of years. Warm, good eye contact. He does not do small talk. So you can’t really remember why or how you became friends because you are always on high alert that new people are somehow going to ruin your life. It’s stupid, because you don’t really need help with that. Note: your self-awareness over this doesn’t make it any better.

Anyway, you think you connected with him on LinkedIn before any other form of social media, which is weird and funny and somewhat of a testament to how little of a fuck you used to give about everything.

The middle is blurry. This is an awful plot. And the pairing doesn’t make any sense — test audiences would hate you together. You’re a shitty protagonist. Nothing real happens. There’s really nobody to root for. Who cares? It’s bad writing. Your friends wince when you recite it — you use too much flowery language and someone asks you to stop moving your arms around so much and you start editing the more times you retell it. You want to seem like the Good Guy. You aren’t.

The ending is convoluted because you kept insisting that something needed to happen. You wanted to be the one to save the story. It’s the point in the plot where the protagonist is supposed to have a montage and a makeover or whatever and decides to turn their life around and then everything falls into place. But there’s no montage in this story — it’s dragged out for an unbearable length of time. People would walk out of the movie theater.

There are maybe three main endings and all three of them happened because, while he was certainly a main character in your story, you were definitely not one in his. You should’ve figured that out before writing it in the first place. Now, it’s just a bad story where nothing really happened.