I was surprised to find I had another piece of this in my head. It’s… Still not great, I think. But I’m trying a new thing where I go ahead and write things instead of agonizing over them in my head for thirty years. So here.

Wind.
One branch bends.
Unbroken.
Another breaks.
Falls.
But remains
Itself.

Dorothy crumpled the paper and threw it in the trash. Then she took it out again and carefully flattened it. She sighed.

“Knock-knock.”

She Looked around, surprised. “Gabe?” she said to the empty room.

He stepped through the closed door. “How did-” she tried. “What did-” she tried again. Every question she wanted to ask felt stupid in light of the material reality of him. Or unreality, as the case may be.

“How did it go?” he asked. “The audition. That was yesterday, right?”

She wasn’t done with trying to interrogate him, but she let him distract her anyway. “Understudy,” she said. “Just as much work but less scary. They cast Anna, though. Rebecca Gibbs. I guess it turns out she always wanted to be an actress? She’s not ant good at it, but she’s popular.”

“Congratulations, I think,” he said. He seemed slightly distracted, looking around her room with a curiosity Dorothy couldn’t quite parse. He walked over to the window and looked out. “Nice view,” he said. “I like the tree.”

“Why did you knock?” she asked.

He looked down at her desk. “I thought it might make you uncomfortable if I just bamfed into existence in your bedroom,” he said.

She blanched at the thought. “So you can just do that, show up here whenever you want? What if I was naked?”

He blushed impressively. “I wouldn’t. We have… There’s procedures. Your privacy and autonomy are completely protected. Mostly. As much as we can. It’s complicated. And mysterious. Sorry. Did you write this?”

He was looking at the poem. Suddenly self-conscious, she reached through him to snatch it off the table, crumpled it again, and threw it in the can. “What are you doing here, anyway?”

“I came to check on you. Make sure everything worked out okay. I know I got you in some hot water the other day. That was careless of me.”

She looked away. “Anna still thinks I’m weird, but I’m not sure if that’s a bad thing. And then there’s her friends.”

“Oh?” Gabe asked with a tone of surprise that wasn’t entirely convincing.

Dorothy rolled her eyes. “Don’t play dumb. Someone brought a six-pack. And they got caught. It would’ve been pretty bad for me and Anna if we’d been there. You knew.” It wasn’t a question.

“It’s complicated,” he said. “Nothing’s set in stone, but some things have more wiggle-room than others.”

“How?” she asked. “And why me? What’s it to you?”

“It’s…” he struggled.

“Complicated?”

He sighed and started pacing. “Thing is, most people’s lives just sort of work themselves out. There’s nature and nurture and genetics and free will and externalities and internalities and a million little nudges and mostly it all just balances out and people sort of tumble into the space the world has made for them, and that’s fine. It’s like… Skiing.”

“Skiing?” Dorothy asked, lost.

“When you’re halfway down the mountain, maybe technically you could change your mind and go somewhere other than the bottom, but it would be a lot of work, and you’d probably fail, and besides, the bottom was where you meant to go in the first place.”

This did not help Dorothy make sense of what he was saying.

“But anyway. There’s a flow and most people just go with it. But some people more sort of… Don’t. They’re slippery. It’s like skiing and… Actually that metaphor doesn’t go anywhere. The point is that you’re different. You’re… Slippery.”

“Why?”

Gabe shrugged. “Don’t know. It’s complicated. And this time I mean that it’s so complicated that I don’t understand it either. Some times those million little nudges line up just so, and instead of you falling into the space the world left for you, the world falls into the space you left for it.”

She shook her head. “What is this, some kind of Campbell thing? I’m the chosen one and I have a great destiny to fulfill?”

He raised his hands defensively. “No, nothing like that. Kinda the opposite. You don’t have a destiny. You’re a free agent. That’s why I’m here. When a person could do anything, there’s some incentive to make sure they do the right thing.”

“What does that mean?” Dorothy asked. “What kind of incentive? What’s the right thing, and why does anyone care about me? I’m nobody.”

Gabe took a quick, sharp breath. “You’re not nobody. You could do so much. You could change the world. So…” he looked around uncomfortably. “Do a good job at it, maybe?”

“How?”

He smiled. “Just keep doing what you’re doing. You’re a good person. You just need the occasional nudge to make sure you don’t forget that.”

The smart speaker chimed out a dinner bell. “This isn’t the end of this conversation,” Dorothy said.

“I didn’t imagine it would be,” Gabe said with a smile. “Have fun. Live your life. Learn your lines. You’ve got this. And if you don’t, I’ve got your back. In a vague and mysterious sort of way.”

He stuck one hand in his pocket and gave her a jaunty wave with the other one, then popped out of existence. Dorothy waved her hand through the space he’d occupied. This was going to take a lot of getting used to. With a deep sigh, she headed downstairs to dinner.

Ten seconds after the door closed behind her, Gabe winked back into existence. With a guilty glance over his shoulder, he stepped to the wastepaper basket, reached down, and very carefully picked up the crumpled poem.