It looked perfect with nothing written on it. And other things one should not say to one’s reactive friends. But still, part of the problem was that there was no shorthand for what P wanted to say, and what she wanted to say, even though she would oppose the idea of saying anything, was that she had not yet lived what she wanted to write. This was a paradoxical aspiration however, because we did not believe in autobiography, memoir, nonfiction, or narrative as ways to approach writing. We knew that we were both potentially fictional, or we hoped to become so in order to experience the liberty of two-dimensional characters. This was not cynical on our part because we believed that the ability to invent ourselves necessary in order to invent anything else. But our notions were hypothetical, as we had not figured out an escape from the difficulties of being three-dimensional persons in a nonfictional world. We knew we needed to know something and then to dictate nothing. We had no interest in writing about something that already occurred.