The notebook lay open on the café table, its pages still blank at three in the afternoon. I'd ordered a second coffee I didn't need, watching the barista's hands move through the familiar choreography of grinding, tamping, pulling. Steam rose in thin ribbons. Outside, a man in a gray coat stood at the crosswalk, waiting even though no cars were coming. He stood there for a full minute after the light changed, staring at something across the street I couldn't see.

I wrote that down. Not the whole scene—just "man waiting at green light." Three years ago, I would have invented his entire backstory on the spot, would have known his name and occupation and secret grief. Now I know better. The not-knowing is the aperture through which the story enters.

By four o'clock, I had three more fragments: overheard, "I already told you I would"—voice tired, not angry. Woman at next table reading same page for ten minutes. My coffee gone cold, still half-full. None of them connected. I tried forcing a narrative thread between them and produced two paragraphs of absolute garbage, the kind of writing that sounds like writing, where every sentence announces its own cleverness.

I crossed it all out. Started again with just the image of the man at the crosswalk. Let him stand there. Let the light change twice, three times. Let him finally step into the street, still looking at that invisible thing. I didn't explain what he saw. I didn't need to. The reader would see it too, whatever it was.

Someone once told me that poetry is the art of knowing when to stop. Fiction is the art of knowing what to leave out. Today I'm learning they're the same art.

The notebook isn't blank anymore. Five pages, maybe four hundred words. Tomorrow I'll see if any of it survives.

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