Back Story

It was a weary, lonely summer night in a small southern city where nobody seemed alive, and nothing moved except for a stray piece of trash or an alley cat searching for something to eat. Most people in the city were asleep, and the windows of most apartments were dark, showing no signs of life. One or two windows might have had the blue glow of a television still on, where someone had stayed up to catch the late, late show. In the streets, though, one could hear the permanent hum of modern life humming right along.

There was one window with a warm yellow glow radiating from it. Inside this apartment on the fourth floor of a four-story building lived a wannabe young writer who liked writing late at night. He was sitting at his writing table, which was set beside the window that looked out at the sleeping city. He liked to listen to music to help stimulate his mind with ideas to write about, and right now, he was listening to Chet Baker singing his version of “My Foolish Heart.”

To get through the long late nights, he relied on a pot of coffee that he fixed every night before sitting down to write. He had made his coffee earlier than usual and was already on his third cup. There might have been enough for one more cup, but he wasn’t sure it would be enough to get him through the night. If it wasn’t, so be it. He would push through until morning.

His notebook was scribbled with words here and there—words circled, words in a line, as if he were trying to make an outline for a story. On other pages were words placed together in sentences and paragraphs. Some pages of his notebook were filled with words that fit together to tell stories. “She is a wannabe writer,” he said to himself, then took a sip of coffee. “She runs an independent bookshop.”

He looked up from his notebook and saw a woman—a little short, with short brown hair and blue eyes—staring at him as she sat on the windowsill. He could tell that she was not happy. “Is that the best you can do?” she asked him. “I’m always a writer who runs a bookstore. I’m never the main character. I’m always the friend of the main character who accompanies them on their adventure.”

“That’s the point of your character,” the writer told her.

“Can’t I be the one who has the adventure?”

“No!” the writer replied. “That’s for the man in your life.”

“Don’t you have other ideas for my character? Let me guess—I’m short, with brown hair, blue eyes, and a little short, but with the perfect body.”

The writer stared at her, then answered, “Yes.”

The woman shook her head and said, “You’re really fixated on a specific look for your female love interest, you know?”

“I know.”

“Who am I? An ex-girlfriend? Or am I some woman you’re fixated on? An actress you like?”

About that time, a tall, dark man walked out of the shadows and leaned down on the desk. “Are we going to get this story written, or are you just going to sit there and listen to her whine about her character?”

The writer shook his head. “You’re right. I need to get back to writing.” The woman and the man disappeared from his room and returned to the pages of his notebook. The writer thought about the woman’s objection to being just a wannabe writer who runs a bookstore. “It shows that she has an intelligent and creative side,” he reasoned. Then he thought about the male character. “He’s an anthropologist who specializes in Viking history and has just returned from Iceland on a dig. He enters the bookstore, meets the woman, they like each other, and agree to have dinner together. Then they go for a cup of coffee.”

He raised his pen again and tapped it on the table as he thought to himself. “Coffee shop, then the kiss, make love, then the adventure.” As he thought, the pen tapped, and before he realized it, he was tapping along to the beat of the song. As he looked down at the pen tapping on the table, he thought of the lovers walking, and for a moment, he could picture them walking “in the night, hand in hand, to the beat of ‘My Foolish Heart.’” He wrote this down, then thought, “It’s raining.” He wrote that down and circled it. “It’s two a.m.,” he wrote, then added, “The man carried a blue umbrella in his hand.” The writer stopped writing, looked at his paper again, and said out loud, “That’s perfect.” He closed his eyes, imagined the scene of the man and the woman walking in the rain down a wet sidewalk in a city wrapped in a dark veil with a gleam of neon burning brightly. He let his thoughts wander, then opened his eyes and feverishly wrote the line: “Two lovers walked along the sidewalk in the pouring rain.”

He stopped and looked at the sentence, then leaned back in his chair. He wasn’t satisfied with what he had written. “Maybe I should just call it a night and go to sleep,” he thought, as the echoes of the woman’s objections clanged in his head. The music playing on the phonograph captured his attention again. He turned to look at the record going around and around, with Chet’s trumpet blowing out its dry, airy, melancholy notes from the speakers and across his apartment.

“There was an echo of a song in their heads, its steady beat in their feet as they stumbled drunkenly through the pouring rain along the wet, broken sidewalk, laughing. He held a blue umbrella in his hand, trying to keep it over her head to keep her dry, yet the rain was pushed sideways by a blowing wind, soaking them both.”

The writer stopped his pen and looked at what he had written. “Okay! I like that,” he said out loud to the empty air and walls. He picked up his coffee cup, took the last sip of coffee, got up, walked over to the kitchen, and poured another cup. He didn’t return to the chair. Instead, he walked over to his window and looked down at the street below. As he stood there, he let his mind imagine the woman and man walking in the rain again.

The couple walked together along the broken sidewalk in the pouring rain. There was a song in their heads, a beat in their feet, as they stumbled drunkenly along the uneven pavement. The woman’s face was fair, young, and beautiful. Her eyes were blue, her hair a dark chestnut color. Her toe caught the edge of an uneven slab of sidewalk, sending her tumbling for a moment until the man caught her and stopped her from falling face-first into the concrete. Drunk and free of inhibition, they laughed about it before continuing on.

“It’s really coming down,” the man said as he struggled to keep the blue umbrella above their heads.

The woman didn’t say anything as she scanned the windows of the apartments they were passing. She caught a glimpse of a dark figure in one of the windows, four stories above, looking down at them. She had only looked quickly, but her mind wondered who the guy was watching them and thought about how nice it would be to feel dry and warm, curled up on a couch watching a movie.

There was another figure—an old man with a bucket of roses—crouched under the awning of a fruit stand up ahead. The man saw the old man and his roses and said to the woman, “One minute,” as he pulled her out from the rain under the awning where the old man sat smoking a cigarette.

“I didn’t even see him a minute ago,” the woman said as she stared at the man now looking up at them from the step where he sat.

“Can I help you?” the old man asked.

“Can I buy a rose?” the man asked.

“Just the one?”

The man nodded, and the old man took a rose from the bucket and handed it to him. The man then handed the rose to the beautiful woman at his side, who now held it in her hand and stared at the petals. She smiled at her lover and said, “Thank you,” then smelled the rose. Her face was lit by a sliver of silver light, cutting across her eyes and revealing a sadness that the man didn’t see behind her smile.

“How much?” he asked the old flower seller.

The old man looked up at him, then at the woman, then back at the man and said, “For a smile as beautiful as hers, it’s free.”

The man thanked the flower salesman, and together, they walked out from under the dry awning and back into the cold, wet rain. As they walked, lightning burned cracks in the sky, and the clanging of thunder followed each strike.

“We need to get inside before we get struck by lightning,” the man said.

“It’d be a good night to die,” the woman whispered, almost inaudibly.

The man didn’t hear her words as he searched the city for something that might be open where they could wait for the storm to pass.

The writer wrote furiously in his notebook, filling the blank page with words that brought the scene to life. After writing the lines, he leaned back, picked up his coffee again, took another sip, and fixated on the words he had written. Then he looked at the blank page of his notebook, but he didn’t see words now. Instead, he saw the faces of the couple, the rain pouring down, the city. “Don’t mess it up,” he told the man. He knew, though, that something would have to go wrong to create conflict and make the story interesting. He would have to mess up somewhere. Then he thought, “Who are you? What do you do? What makes you so interesting that you get a woman like this?”

“I’m a doctor,” the man’s face spoke from the page. “Make me a lawyer.”

“No,” the writer said. “How about an architect? That’s a good job for a romance story.” Then he thought, “Or an anthropologist who just returned from some remote part of the world on a wild adventure.”

The man smiled. “I like that. It makes me seem more mysterious and daring.”

“Why can’t he just be a regular man with a simple job, who’s just a nice guy?” the woman now asked the writer.

The writer thought about what the woman had said. “Can a simple man with a simple job get a woman like you?” he wondered aloud while talking to his character.

“If he’s a nice guy,” she replied.

The writer and the man laughed. He was trying to write a story about a perfect night, but he knew simple men with simple lives didn’t get interesting, beautiful women to fall in love with them.

“What about me?” the woman asked.

“What do you mean?”

“My backstory, my motivation, my dreams, my desires. Do I have any of these things, or am I just a flat character with no depth?”

“Backstory for you?” the writer wondered. “You’re the beautiful woman in this love story that every man wants. All you have to be is pretty,” the writer told her. She didn’t say anything back, but now the writer looked at her as she walked down the sidewalk and realized there was a sadness in her eyes. He wondered if she didn’t want to be “just another pretty face” in his story.

He reached over to pick up his coffee cup, realizing it was drained dry again. He stood up to fix another cup, only to find the carafe was dry too. “Should I fix another cup of coffee or call it a night?” he wondered. He measured his tiredness and realized he wasn’t very tired, even though it was past midnight. He walked over to the window again, looked down into the street, and saw the coffee shop a block down was still open. He walked back to his writing chair, grabbed his pen and notebook, and headed out of his apartment for a cup of coffee.

The writer exited the door of his apartment building and stepped into the light and dark of the city streets. He raced across the empty avenue to reach the sidewalk on the other side and proceeded toward the coffee shop. As he walked, he noticed the neon lights, the city lamps, the dark windows, and the sound of his shoes on the sidewalk. He noticed one lamp, where it stood, how the light poured down from it and painted a round halo on the city asphalt. “A great place for a perfect kiss in a movie,” he told himself as he walked past it. “I wonder if I can use it sometime in my story?” He stopped and imagined the man and the woman under the halo of light, staring at each other as if they were about to kiss. It was then the woman turned away from the man’s face and looked toward the writer. “I don’t want to be just a pretty face.”

“Where’s the rain?” the man asked the writer. “Isn’t it supposed to be raining?”

The writer fixed his imagination, and now it was raining down on the lovers. The man was staring deeply into the woman’s eyes again. He leaned in for a kiss, but she turned away.

“Quit being difficult,” the writer said to her. “It’s a story about a perfect night. All you have to do is be pretty and act like he’s the greatest lover in the world.”

“I can be so much more interesting, you know, if you just imagined it,” she said, and then she turned and kissed the man.

The scene faded from the writer’s mind as he continued to the coffee shop. The coffee shop was a plain, cold place, not very homely. There was nothing exceptional about it except that it served warm coffee on cold nights to night owls and late-night workers. When the writer entered the coffee shop, he didn’t see it for what it was but for how he wrote about it. The name, Ben’s Coffee Shop, became Picasso’s Coffee Shop. When he walked through the door, the cold, bare minimalism of the place changed into a warm environment with a burning fireplace and candles flickering on every table. The angry-looking old barista became a beautiful woman. The walls even changed to replicas of Picasso’s paintings. In the back, in the dark corner, he imagined the Blue Guitarist hanging over his regular table, far enough from the others to give him the privacy to observe and write.

The writer was one of the few people in the shop. Others were just couples scattered throughout the shop and a few friends here and there. There was one person reading, and he was the only one who had come to write. He raced to his table, dropped his pen and pad to mark the table as his, then walked to the bar, ordered a black coffee, and returned to his table with the coffee. Once he was settled, he opened the pad again, raised his pen, took a sip of coffee, and let the nib of the pen touch the blank page. He began writing again. He wondered, “What can ruin a perfect night?” He knew the man could say the wrong thing, do the wrong thing, or look at her the wrong way. “It’s too easy for a perfect night to go wrong,” he told himself. “But I want something more dramatic,” he added.

They paused for a moment to catch their breath, and it was in this moment, in the pouring rain running down her face, that he was able to look into her brown eyes and see love glowing behind those blue windows. “We need to get out of this rain,” he said to her, his thoughts lucid for a moment, overcoming the drunkenness with a moment of rational thought.

“Where?” she asked. “Everything is closed.”

He looked around the city, scanning one side of the sidewalk backward and forward, then the other side. He caught sight of a little building tucked between two larger buildings and said out loud, “Picasso’s Coffee Shop is just up ahead.”

“It’s two a.m.,” she said. “It surely won’t be open at this hour.”

“It’s open all night.”

His hand gripped hers tighter than before, and he gave her a tug as he began to pull her into the dark, wet street painted with blurs of neon light. Another flash of lightning, even closer than before, sizzled around them, quickly followed by a loud boom, which urged him to change speeds from a walk to a slow trot.

The water in the street was deep, and as they ran, they tried to tiptoe through the rain to avoid getting their clothes wetter. The woman looked up at them tiptoeing in one of the dark store windows and began to laugh. The man turned back to see her laughing and asked her why.

“We look like fools trying to tiptoe through this puddle of water,” she told him.

“Why is that stupid?”

“We’re already soaked. It’s not like we can get any wetter.”

The man didn’t respond as he pulled her up onto the far sidewalk, and they trotted up the sidewalk. He stopped running after a few seconds, still a block from the coffee shop, turned to look at the woman, and said, “You’re right.” He smiled, let go of her hand, folded up the umbrella, placed his arm in a hook to beckon her to put hers around his, and then, at a casual walk as if they were walking in sunshine, continued up the sidewalk. “Isn’t this a much better pace?”

“Definitely,” she said as she looked up to let the rain fall on her face. Her face was fair and wet, her hair dark and wet, her eyes blue and still sad. She was staring upward at the dark clouds and silver drops of rain, smiling. It pleased her so much that she pulled back

The writer, sitting in the dark corner of the coffee shop, now looked up from his pad and pen to watch the door, waiting for it to open. He knew who was about to enter, and when the door swung open, a couple walked into the coffee shop. They were wet. The man held the door for the woman, and she entered first. They looked around the room, trying to find an empty table. The writer looked back down at his paper and wrote some more words. He was thinking out loud once more. “He’s an anthropologist who teaches at the local university, specializing in Viking studies, and has just returned from Russia on a dig. Any woman would be delighted to be with such a man,” he told himself. He looked up again, listened to the room, trying to capture some sounds with his ears, when he realized the music playing was something modern and upbeat. He wanted the music in his story to be aged, dusty, and with a little darkness. He thought about what music would be perfect for such a scene when it hit him, and he began to write again.

Their frigid bodies were met with a cozy, pleasant atmosphere as they peeled their coats from their bodies and shook off the wet rain. He placed his blue umbrella in the umbrella pot and hung their jackets on an empty coat rack. They both looked around the room, observing the murals of Picasso’s paintings on the walls watching them. Leonard Cohen’s Famous Blue Raincoat filled the room with an air of romance and darkness as it mixed with the aromas of percolating coffee.

They looked around the room for a table while he observed the people in the room, trying to read their faces, looking for mysterious characters that might pose a threat to them. This wasn’t that part of his story, he knew, so he relaxed as he saw an old man at one table reading a book, a couple a few tables over curled up around a candle whispering to each other over coffee, the beautiful Jamaican barista going through her phone, and a single dark figure near the back of the coffee shop writing. He detected no threats as he turned to find a table near the window looking out at the city.

“Do you like that table?” he asked the woman, even though he knew she would be fine with it, and if she protested, he would convince her otherwise.

“It’s perfect,” she said.

He led her to the table, pulled out her chair for her, and she sat down. “Do you want me to get you a cup of coffee?”

“Yes, a cappuccino, please.”

He turned from her and made his way to the bar as he heard Cohen’s song singing darkly in his ears. The words were like a secret code to love that he wanted to break to get to the heart of this beautiful woman he was with.

She, on the other hand, was looking across the room but wasn’t staring at the man who had gone to get them coffee. Instead, she was now staring at the dark figure alone in the shadows, writing on his pad and paper. She wanted to go over to him and explain that she could be more than just a pretty face in his stupid story. “You’ve never even been published,” she hollered out across the room. “How can you even call yourself a writer?” Everyone in the room paused, looking at her and then at the man in the back of the room who didn’t want to be recognized. It was only a moment, then the barista handed the man his coffees, and he returned to the table and sat down across from the woman.

The writer, having heard the woman’s loud barking cry, was now looking over the coffee shop too. He laughed at himself as he thought he heard the woman’s voice speaking to him. He then looked down at his notebook, then back up, and scanned the room again. He looked over at the barista—she was a woman in her fifties who had had a rough life and smoked too much. She was neither Black, Jamaican, nor foreign. He looked over at the couple having coffee a few tables over, and they weren’t even talking. They were young and both were spending more time on their phones than looking at each other. He wondered if “they looked up from their phones long enough to make love.” The ones who were just friends a few more tables over were interacting, laughing, and living their lives. He then asked himself, “Why don’t I have any friends?” He thought about this and knew that being a struggling writer meant you had few to no friends because you were boring, always secluded and alone, which you needed to enjoy being a writer. “Writing is a solitary affair,” he told himself. He shook his head. “Get back in the story,” he told himself, “and stop thinking about your pitiful life.” He focused again on the empty table near the window where he had placed his two lovers.

He watched closely as her red lips touched the rim of the porcelain cup to take a sip of coffee. “Is it good?” he asked her.

“It’s perfect,” she said.

He smiled as he took a sip of his coffee, then set his cup back down. He looked up at the woman, realizing now he was feeling warm all over and that she, too, had a redness in her cheeks again. He gazed into her eyes once more and saw the sadness again, wondering why it was there. He had never seen such sadness in a woman’s eyes before. “If her eyes were the windows to her soul, then her soul was in turmoil,” he thought as he looked at her sleeve and started reading the words she was feeling. “What’s wrong?” he asked her. “You’re with me. Everything should be perfect for you now. I am the man of your dreams.”

“You are the perfect man,” she said, “but I’m flat and dull and just a pretty face in your story.”

“That’s the point of you being in this story,” he told her. “You’ll whine about your problems, and I’ll have this interesting backstory. I’ll enter your life, make love to you, and all your problems will just suddenly vanish, and everything will be great after that.” He said this with a sincere smile on his face.

“Don’t I deserve more too? To be someone interesting?”

“You are interesting. You’re smart and beautiful, and you own your own bookstore—probably—or run a museum or maybe even be an artist yourself.”

“And you—you’re an anthropologist.”

“A Viking anthropologist,” he corrected her.

“And your tale will be the focus, while the purpose of me being in your story will be to be your conquest,” she pointed out.

“What’s the problem?” he asked. “You get to make love to me. Which reminds me, I should be saying to you soon, ‘I need to get you home to get you out of these wet clothes.’”

She should have been smiling, but she was frowning. She picked up the cup of coffee, took another sip, stared at the shallow man with the perfect face and body, and felt nothing but emptiness.

“Her eyes flashed with passion, desire burned throughout her body as she felt his hand touch the side of her body and pull her close. He then leaned forward and buried his face inside the nook of her neck and began…”

He stopped writing, looked at the words he had written down, then scribbled through them, upset with his choice. He looked up at the table by the window and eyed the woman, thinking to himself that she was perfect. She’s smart and beautiful, and here she is with the perfect man—a man with an amazing career and he’s handsome. “Why does she even need a backstory?” he asked himself.

He stared at the notebook in front of him and wrote down the words: “She runs a bookstore.” The woman is standing in front of a big national bookstore. “No, a small independent bookstore.” Now he imagined the woman standing in front of a window where her small bookstore was set. “There, she has a backstory.” He picked up his cup of coffee and took a sip. “It’s cold,” he realized. He got up and walked over to the barista and had her fix him another cup of coffee. He returned to his table with his cup of coffee, placed it on the table, then headed to the bathroom.

In the bathroom, he washed his hands at the sink when the man from his story walked in and began to check himself out in the mirror. He looked over at the man in the mirror, and it occurred to him that he had written a great character.

“You are a very handsome man,” he said to him.

The man looked over at him and smiled, showing all his perfect white teeth. His jaw was chiseled with a dimple on his chin, his eyes were brown, and his skin was olive. He was six feet tall with broad shoulders. He was everything the writer thought every woman wanted in a man. “Thank you,” the man said to the writer. He then checked himself out in the mirror. “I think so too,” he winked at himself.

“I see why she likes you.”

“I’m smart, handsome, successful, right?” he asked the writer.

“Of course. You could be in a Hallmark movie.”

“What’s my conflict in this story you’re writing?”

“You just returned from Russia studying Viking artifacts and somehow stumbled on evidence of some ancient Viking artifact that a secret organization is trying to keep you from discovering.”

“Nice. I take it I’m successful.”

“Of course. Nobody wants to read a story where the hero dies.”

The man looked over at the writer and smiled. “No, they don’t.” He fixed his tie in the mirror. “How did I meet this woman?”

“You went by her bookstore looking for a rare book on Vikings, and you liked her. You asked her to have dinner with you, where you had a few drinks, and now you’ve stumbled down to this coffee shop.”

“I knew she would be a bookstore owner,” the man spoke to the writer. “Are we going to make love now?”

“Not yet,” the writer told him. “I think we should let that happen a few chapters from now.”

“She’s going to enjoy it, right?”

“Oh yes. You’ll be her best lover ever.”

“I thought so.” The man then turned, and he and the writer walked back out of the bathroom. When they got back out to the coffee shop, they both looked over at the table where the woman was supposed to be, but she was gone.

“Where did she go?” the man asked the writer. “Was she supposed to leave like this?”

“No!” the writer told him. “She’s supposed to walk back out of the coffee shop with you, and the two of you were going to dance and kiss beneath a streetlamp.”

The man looked around the coffee shop, then threw up his hands and cried out, “What do I do now? The story can’t go on without her.”

“Stay here,” the writer told him. “I’ll go find her and try to find out why she walked out on our story.”

The writer then headed out the door to go find the woman. He couldn’t imagine where an imaginary character would run off to. He looked around the city and tried to think, “Where would I send her?” He then thought about a little park a few blocks down. He knew that was where the woman would go. It was scenic and would make a nice shot in a movie.

As the writer walked up on the scene, he saw the woman sitting on a bench. She was alone. There was a path between two benches that led to a mural, and she was sitting alone on one of the benches, in tears. He sat down on the bench across from her and watched her. She looked up at him. She knew who he was—he was the writer.

“I’m sorry,” she apologized. “I didn’t mean to run out of your story like that.”

“What’s wrong?” he asked her.

“My backstory is the problem. I am always the same woman in every story you write. I am dark-haired, blue-eyed, a little short, intelligent, with a creative side. I am mid-to-late twenties, and I will never be any older. I will never be a blonde or a redhead. I will never be African, Asian, or Latino. I’ll always be a Caucasian female, probably from a well-to-do family.”

“I never talk about your family. I write action and adventure.”

“I’ll never be gay.”

“I have to have a love interest for the hero.”

“Who is always a male.”

“That’s the kind of stories I write.”

“Why not make me a male character, and the hero falls in love with a male character? That would be thinking outside the box, don’t you think?” she argued.

“I’m not making my hero gay.”

“Why not?”

“Can you imagine John Wayne gay? Clint Eastwood? Arnold Schwarzenegger? Stallone? You can’t sell a gay hero.”

“You might if you try.”

“I’m not interested in making a social statement. I just want to write a good story that people will find entertaining and hopefully sell the story so I can work as a writer professionally,” the writer explained to her.

“It’s about money, then.”

“Yes,” the writer shouted. “It’s about money. Money pays the bills. I want people to buy my writings, to go see them in movies so I can make money. The characters have to resonate with the people, and most people are in traditional relationships.”

The woman didn’t immediately respond as she looked at the desperate writer sitting across from her. He looked tired and starved, and she knew he was desperate to make money on his writings. She hung her head. She did understand his situation. “You are right. You must break through first before you can really push the backstory of your characters. I am sorry. I will head back to my place and continue your story.”

The writer had nothing else to say, but he could no longer forget what she had said. His characters were a little dull and predictable, and he wished he could color his characters in different shades of sexuality and colors, but he needed to make the sale. He got up from the bench and followed her back to the coffee shop to continue writing his story.

The writer returned to the coffee shop, grabbed his pad and pen off his table, then turned to walk back out of the coffee shop. He gave a quick glance at his lovers at their table again. They were getting back up from their table, and the man was now putting her jacket back over her shoulders and his too. The writer wondered where they were to go now. “They walk out of the coffee shop, pause under the streetlamp, and kiss.” They left out of the door ahead of the writer, who followed them out the door, writing every detail of the night in his notebook. He listened to the sound of the rain pouring around their ears, the drops landing on top of the blue umbrella, the sound of their feet on the wet sidewalk, the glow of the neon lights in the puddles of water. “Music,” he thought to himself. “What music would I have playing now?” It occurred to him pretty quickly that he wanted a song by Leonard Cohen playing. “Leonard would capture the mood,” he told himself, “but what song?” Then it occurred to him, and he knew that Dance Me to the End of Love was the song he wanted playing as they walked. He looked at the scene and watched as they walked slowly through the rain, and he told himself, “The scene is set, and everything is perfect.” So he now just watched as two lovers walked toward the streetlamp for their kiss.

“Where’s the music coming from?” she asked him.

“I don’t know,” he said as they walked beneath the streetlamp and paused.

“The moon is shining,” she looked to the sky. “How is the moon shining? It’s raining.”

“I don’t know,” the man said to her as the song continued to play. “It’s like being in a love story where everything is perfect, even if nothing makes sense.”

She smiled. He smiled.

“Ask her to dance,” the writer said.

“Would you like to dance?” the man asked the woman, and so they began to dance.

They began to dance around under the streetlamp, moving their feet to the beat of Cohen’s love song. They danced so vigorously that he lost his handle on the umbrella, and it fell from his hand, landing next to them as they danced in the rain. It was after they danced for so long that their bodies grew tired and warm, and he pulled her to him. They looked at each other again. Her face was round, moon-shaped, and both cold and warm. Her eyes now longed for the moment that was coming—the first kiss. It was that time. He moved his face forward, she didn’t draw back, and then it happened, as if on cue—they kissed. It was the perfect moment, on the perfect night, and the kiss was perfect too.

As they kissed, the writer watched them. He circled them now, looking at the girl, frozen in time. He observed her and walked over to her, whispering in her ear, “This is how a love story should develop.” However, he knew that he hadn’t given her character the depth she deserved. She was much deeper than just a pretty face. He leaned near her to look into her blue eyes, and there he saw, in the corners, tears that did not fall, just hanging in the corner of her eyes, betraying her thoughts—a sadness

The rain quickly evaporated as the writer folded up his notebook, put it away in his coat pocket, then looked eastward to see a blue in the sky that was ushering the stars and blackness westward. “The night is over,” he said to himself. “Time to get back home.”

He entered the apartment, put his coat on the hanger, proceeded into the living room, and laid his notebook and pen on the coffee table. He didn’t hesitate as he entered his bedroom, where he saw the sunlight peeking into his window, looking down on his bed. He imagined the lovers of his story making love right before the action was about to take place.

The writer was satisfied that his story was finished now. The papers were filled with action and romance, and he was sure he could sell it. This was what he was thinking as he pulled himself into bed, pulled the blankets around him, closed his eyes, and fell asleep.

(DeepSeeks Ending)

As the writer watched the lovers kiss beneath the streetlamp, he felt a strange ache in his chest. The scene was perfect, just as he had envisioned it—the rain, the music, the glow of the neon lights reflecting in the puddles. But something was missing. He looked at the woman, her face still frozen in that moment of passion, and noticed the tears still clinging to the corners of her eyes.

“Why are you crying?” he whispered, though he knew she couldn’t hear him.

She turned her head slightly, as if sensing his presence, and her voice echoed in his mind. “Because I’m more than this. I’m more than just a pretty face in your story.”

The writer stepped back, startled. He looked down at his notebook, the pages filled with his hurried scrawl, and realized how flat his characters had become. They were archetypes, not people. The man was the dashing hero, the woman the beautiful love interest. But where were their fears, their flaws, their dreams?

He sat down on the wet sidewalk, ignoring the cold seeping through his clothes, and opened his notebook again. This time, he didn’t write about the perfect kiss or the perfect night. Instead, he wrote about the woman’s sadness, the man’s insecurities, the way they both longed for something they couldn’t quite name. He wrote about her bookstore, not as a quaint backdrop, but as a place where she poured her heart into every shelf, every recommendation, every conversation with a stranger. He wrote about the man’s dig in Iceland, not as a glamorous adventure, but as a lonely, grueling journey that left him questioning his purpose.

As he wrote, the scene around him began to change. The rain slowed, the music faded, and the lovers stepped out of their frozen moment. They looked at him, not as characters bound to his words, but as real people, alive and breathing.

“Thank you,” the woman said, her voice soft but firm. “For seeing me.”

The man nodded, his expression thoughtful. “And for seeing me, too.”

The writer closed his notebook and stood up. The street was quiet now, the city asleep. He walked back to his apartment, his mind buzzing with new ideas. When he reached his writing table, he didn’t sit down immediately. Instead, he looked out the window at the sleeping city, the faint glow of dawn beginning to break through the darkness.

He realized then that his story wasn’t about perfection. It was about the messy, beautiful, imperfect lives of people trying to find their way in the world. And for the first time in a long time, he felt excited to write.

As the sun rose, he picked up his pen and began again.

This ending shifts the focus from the writer’s obsession with crafting a “perfect” story to his realization that true storytelling lies in embracing imperfection and depth. It gives the characters more agency and humanity, while also allowing the writer to grow as a person and an artist. Let me know what you think!