....

Once upon a time, there was a boy who couldn't focus on anything. From his birth, he had been an imaginative person. When he had been young and free, he would come up with laughable frames of ideas and smile to himself at their absurdity. But as he grew older, and his imagination stayed with him, this had mutated into a parody of itself.

"What if the world was made of cheese?" he thought, without a hint of irony. "What if we could choose our age at will?"

Whether good or bad, they only rarely lasted more than a second, for he was too impatient to be done with anything. In fact, he eventually believed he wasn't coming up with them. He began believing that they were being planted in his head by the Magic 8-Ball of his subconscious, so he wasn't even responsible if they turned out horrible. His father told him off, and he ignored it.

"What if a monster was hidden by obfuscation alone? What if I wrote my thoughts in white chalk on the wall?"

He was rather incorrigible, because nothing ever happened to him, and so he ended up doing poorly in school, because he had suddenly thought something which derailed him.

"What if I had to speak to do my job?"

He didn't want to speak - in fact, he had no intention of working, in his heart of hearts. And so he meandered through secondary school, fudging records and lying to his parents through his teeth, waiting for his father to tell him off. It was all fun and games until he realized the mess he had put himself in.

It had come upon him like any other thought - a sudden flash of inspiration. But it shook him to his core this time.

"What if I were to live?"

He hadn't considered living before that point in time. He felt like a pixie, like some kind of sprite which would naturally burn itself out. And once it got in his head, it refused to leave.

He was no longer happy. He tried to wash away his troubles with a river of other thoughts, but like an iron boat on the riverbed, it simply resurfaced once the water ran out. He began gorging himself on noise, chewing on bits and pieces of useless information, in a meek attempt to drown this thought out. But it stayed, and his life moved on, with the transience which days have.

Nothing changed. Nothing ever changed. He felt like his thoughts were beginning to eat him. Afraid of the wasting diseases which tend to accompany adolescence, he tried to quell them. But it was out of his control, or so he believed, so he simply resigned himself to his fate.

His father told him off, giving him truly golden advice which he could never keep separate from all the little thought experiments he did in his head. Reality had become a thought experiment to him, and he no longer relished the truth and detail of the real world. He invented fake ones instead.

His father told him off again, and he ignored it, right up to the day when his father fell down, in the throes of a struggle with death. He ran to the phone, but he realized that the police number wouldn't quite work.

He tried to remember the hospital number, but he could not. He could not, no matter how hard he tried. Wishing to get it right, and ignoring the gasps and agonized wails on his father, he concentrated hard, scouring his mind in order to tease out that piece of information he swore he remembered.

He never did. The funeral was two weeks afterwards.

He flew around like a pool ball. His father was the one who had told him off, but without his father, there was no one to *not* tell him off either. He hadn't quite realized how important it was for such a person to be around until then.

He cried in despair, and in laughter, and in fright, and the day of his reckoning marched towards him. His grades could not have gotten any worse without his father, so they hadn't went down so much as experienced a steep drop. He felt like he was losing his sanity, but fortunately for him, he was not.

When he finally confided in his mother, she coolly told him that only he could fix the mess he had made, and so he had to work hard to get out of his rut. And so he did, under the assumption that it was never too late. He spoke to his teachers, and he found them to be fair and kind. He felt bad for having never spoken to them, not once before in his measly life, but he decided to let it go. He made clubs, he joined societies, and he was far too late to make any remarkable difference in his life.

But his life was not the issue; a grand total of two years was what they saw. They saw him at his worst and his best, and though many shunned him for his dishonesty, his horrible crimes, there were many who stood by him and kindly offered to carry him.

He wondered dimly, the boy with his living father and falling grades, if it would help any to write such a thing down. But as he finished his words, he honestly felt lighter.

He was a good person, after all. He could fix his mistakes. There wouldn't always be the fourth dot after the other three, but for the short time in which he could learn for free, there was.