Marginalized

I woke up with a different name this morning.

That happens more often than you’d think. Yesterday I was called Martin. The day before that, Elias. For a confusing hour last Thursday I was “Detective Grimsby,” complete with a limp and a tragic backstory involving a dockyard fire. None of it stuck.

Today I am Adrian Vale, which I rather like. It sounds solid. Dependable. The sort of man who owns at least one tasteful coat.

I know all of this because my author can’t make up her mind.

Most characters, I suspect, are born finished. They arrive on the page fully assembled, like respectable adults stepping off a train. I, on the other hand, have been constructed like a piece of nervous furniture—assembled, disassembled, and hammered together again whenever the mood strikes.

At this exact moment I am sitting at a small kitchen table, drinking coffee I don’t remember brewing, while my author hovers somewhere above me like an indecisive god.

“Adrian feels restless,” she types.

I do not.

I feel perfectly calm.

Nevertheless, a jitter crawls up my spine on cue. My leg begins bouncing beneath the table. I try to stop it and discover I can’t.

“Stop that,” I mutter.

She ignores me.

You might wonder how I know she’s there. It isn’t a voice, exactly. More like weather inside my skull—sudden shifts in pressure, sentences forming out of thin air. I experience life as she writes it, a split second after she decides it.

For instance, right now she’s considering whether I own a cat.

Please don’t give me a cat, I think.

“A calico brushes against Adrian’s ankle,” she writes.

Too late.

The cat materializes under the table, warm and smug and entirely uninvited. I’ve never owned a pet in my life, but suddenly I’m filled with a complicated history of vet bills and scratched sofas.

“I’m allergic,” I say.

“No you’re not,” she replies, by way of deleting the sentence in which I sneeze.

This is how arguments work between us.

We didn’t always fight.

In the beginning I was grateful just to exist. I remember the first scene she ever wrote for me: a park bench, a drizzle of rain, a folded newspaper. I was lonely then, but at least I was coherent. I had a job. A childhood. A consistent eye color.

Then she joined a writing group.

After that, everything went sideways.

One week they told her I was too passive. The next week they decided I needed a darker past. Suddenly I had a brother who died, then a brother who didn’t, then no brother at all but an estranged sister who collected porcelain frogs.

She changed my career five times in a single afternoon. Accountant. Violinist. Wilderness guide. Once—briefly—an astronaut, though she abandoned that when she realized she’d have to research orbital mechanics.

I try not to take it personally.

Still, it’s disorienting to look in the mirror and discover you’ve grown a beard because someone on the internet suggested it would make you more “relatable.”

Today she has decided to give me a love interest.

I know this because I feel the idea approaching like a thunderstorm.

“Don’t,” I say aloud.

“Adrian is lonely,” she types.

“I’m really not.”

“He longs for connection.”

“I have a perfectly good cat now. Isn’t that enough?”

Apparently not.

The doorbell rings. I don’t want to answer it, but my feet are already carrying me across the room. My hand reaches for the knob with dreadful inevitability.

On the doorstep stands a woman I have never met and yet instantly recognize as Important.

“Hi,” she says. “I’m Mara.”

Of course she is.

Mara has bright eyes and a quick smile and exactly the sort of effortless charm that requires several drafts to perfect. I can practically feel the author adjusting her behind the scenes, tweaking her dialogue, reconsidering her hair.

“Nice to meet you,” I say, because I have no choice.

For the next three pages we make polite conversation. I learn that Mara paints watercolors, volunteers at an animal shelter, and laughs like wind chimes. I also learn that I find her fascinating, which is news to me.

Halfway through our meet-cute, the author pauses.

I can tell when she pauses. The world goes slightly fuzzy at the edges, like a television losing signal.

She rereads the scene.

She hesitates.

She deletes Mara.

One moment there is a woman on my doorstep; the next there is only an empty hallway and a lingering sense of heartbreak that no longer belongs to anyone.

“That was cruel,” I say to the ceiling.

“Chemistry felt forced,” she replies by way of a margin note.

“You could have tried harder.”

Silence. Then:

“Adrian closes the door, strangely relieved.”

“I am not relieved!”

But I am.

That’s the worst part.

Sometimes I wonder what would happen if she stopped writing altogether. Would I freeze mid-gesture, like a paused film? Would I vanish? Or would I finally be free to make a decision she didn’t approve first?

I’ve tested the boundaries. Once I tried to walk out of a scene she clearly wanted me to stay in. I made it as far as the end of the paragraph before the sentences turned around and marched me right back.

Another time I attempted to change my own dialogue.

“I think—” I began.

She replaced it with, “I know.”

Which was not what I was going to say at all.

We are, it seems, locked together: creator and creation, arguing over the same small patch of imaginary ground.

This afternoon she decides I need a hobby.

Please let it be something normal, I think. Gardening. Baking. Model trains.

“Adrian has taken up sword swallowing,” she writes.

Absolutely not.

I find myself standing in front of a mirror with a gleaming blade in my hands.

“This is ridiculous,” I tell her.

“It adds flair.”

“It adds medical bills!”

She considers this. The sword vanishes.

Thank you.

“Adrian has taken up journaling,” she amends.

Much better.

A notebook appears on the table. A pen slides into my fingers. I begin to write—carefully at first, then with growing enthusiasm. It feels good, shaping my own sentences for once.

I fill three pages before realizing something terrible.

She is using my journal entries as narration.

Even my rebellion is part of the draft.

“Well played,” I admit.

As evening approaches, she tries to decide how my day should end.

For a while she experiments with melancholy. Rain taps the windows. I stare into the distance and contemplate my many nonexistent regrets.

Then she tries comedy. I burn dinner. The cat knocks over a lamp. There is an unfortunate incident with a smoke detector.

Finally she attempts action. A mysterious phone call. A suitcase of stolen diamonds. An international conspiracy that I refuse to participate in on principle.

None of it feels right.

I can sense her frustration. The cursor blinks. Entire paragraphs appear and disappear like nervous birds.

At last she writes a single sentence.

“Adrian sits at his desk, aware that he is unfinished.”

That, at least, is true.

I lean back in my chair and address her directly.

“You know,” I say, “you don’t have to figure me out all at once.”

The cursor stops blinking.

“People change. Stories change. Maybe I’m allowed to be a little uncertain.”

She doesn’t respond, not in words. But I feel the idea settle over her—the possibility that not everything needs to be nailed down tonight.

The room softens. The day loosens its grip.

“Adrian turns off the light,” she writes, “content to see what tomorrow brings.”

I smile into the darkness.

For the first time in a long while, she lets me.