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Narcissus Reflects
by Paul Hina
It was supposed to be a very simple plan. This plan, which was conceived within myself of only the most necessary details, used only in my best judgment to keep everyone involved safely hidden from the possible scandal that could ensue had our identities been uncovered by those who don't understand us. We are the privileged that can watch such beautifully constructed ideas and schemes unfold, much like this one.
In this plan is a carefully written message that I have spent night after night searching for. A night doesn't pass without me staring blankly into a cup of coffee, waiting for that stream of inspiration to flow through me. This plan of mine will save all of those people that, I'm sorry to say, are unaware that they need saving.
My destination to complete this task was to be here at this cafe, carefully chosen for its level of sophisticated seclusion. This establishment has always been held in high regard by the elite class, the many Parisian intellectuals, who decorate this facility on a nightly basis.
Some of the most famous literary heads have been discovered here, and many great word masters can still be found, undiscovered, sitting at one of these lonely tables. The inspiration is always potent in the air. You can smell it, breathe it. You miss it when you are away. There are moments where one finds himself caught in the tail of another man's creation. There have been times when even I have caught someone else's voice sneaking into my work. That was when I could find my mind well enough to write, which has not been the case as of late.
But I digress, losing touch with the story at hand. I am positive that there are those involved who believe this incident to be too carefully planned, too elaborate in its strict unwavering method. I, however, find it to be perfectly reasonable under the circumstances.
It will do no good for me to tell you the story as I remember it, for no better reason than the events, as remembered, occurred in such that they contain very little literary importance. Much like the common tasks one performs in daily life, when told as remembered, they become quite tedious, colorless in recollection. Only when relayed through the colors that one can paint with the proper language do these events become lofty enough to be called plans, schemes, stories, or productions of plans, schemes, stories.
A storyteller is a magician, a master of the lie, the illusionist of a well-rehearsed hoax. Know that nothing that is read is true, only in as far as your memory is true, which it is not. So if I can find the strength, in this once strong writing hand, then I will recount things the way only a writer who has past his prime could tell it, without truths without inspirations, but not without my apologies for the falsities you are surely going to experience even in my recounting a somewhat true event.
As I have stated, and probably will continue to repeat, I used to be a writer, a man that the people of this cafe had a great deal of respect for, a man that people modeled whole styles off of, a figure that stood to be the possible predecessor to the previous literary era.
Of course, I was never audacious enough to presume myself to stand even in the shadow of such masters. I am only referring to the possible thoughts that may have taken place in the minds of those that were surrounding me during the brief period that I spent atop an unseen literary revolution. But a great writer I am no longer. I can scarcely even be considered a writer, by myself, or by anyone else.
I think that when you begin to receive a number of accolades and praises from your peers you begin to expect greatness from yourself, but that is, sadly, only in the beginning of one's career. As the days pass, and your work progresses, you don't notice all the new writers that walk through the doors of this cafe, or any cafe, sitting stoically in their seats, pining away at a half-chewed idea, something they have been thinking about for months, which is probably nothing more than a story that has been done so many times it has become a formula for bad writers of experience to follow when they find they have nothing left to say.
Those young glum novices with the beaten spirits of the Pips, Heathcliffs, and Ishmaels deep set in their unoriginal eyes, their hungry pens wait for ink to unravel for them some truth in their inaptitude to fully articulate that which they have dictated so clearly to their own heads.
These new writers, young monsters murdering words, come here to ravage, rape, and have a glimpse at all the angles of the muse in this room. The muse that has been left by the greats that move through here like the blood of some genetically superior body. They would steal away your every breath of conversation to try and get at the heart of your imagination, your inspiration.
Thus was the case with me. My stories have been stolen time and time again. I still feel those thieves waiting for me inside the cafe with their grins and their laughter, outside of the cafe with books hiding their judging expressions. They all come here for the same reason: the word, the work--one in the same. Stealing words is still work, and so the day's work would be justified.
There is nothing worse for a writer then to learn his misery by sitting to write and finding that there is nothing. As a beginner it happens because you haven't moved from the sheer chore of being a novice, and once you have consumed your craft with the hours of the daylight and drank from the moonlight's remaining wine, there is nothing more disturbing than to be stolen from your imagination, and the one sure way that this happens is through the paranoid illusions that can fester and seethe these horrible anxieties that play with the mind.
