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Let me tell you something. I’ve never written a book before. I have written a lot—diaries, journals, sayings, these kind of long-form open-ended poems.

Millions of people in this country have diagnosed schizophrenia, and millions more go around undiagnosed. I’m not one of them, but when I told my therapist I wanted to publish some of my writings, she gently suggested I try to write something fictional instead.

I’d shared some of the writing I was prouder of with her before, and she’d told me I had some talent. I guess I took that to mean I should try to do more with it. I didn’t expect her to be so dismissive the next time around. She told me they’d call them the ramblings of a schizophrenic.

But I’m not.

Today is the first day of the rest of your life. That was the first thing she told me at our first meeting. I’d been able to get a therapist because of the new job I’d started, and they actually set the appointment up for me and let me leave a little early to take the crosstown bus over to the therapist’s office. I think the coworker who helped arrange it for me really liked me. She seemed really nice.

The first day of the rest of your life. What a cliché.

Every day can be the first day of the rest of your life. Except your last one. And even then, I guess it could be the first day of the rest of your life. Your life would be divided into two parts, your lifespan less a day, and that last day.

Reality is grayer, naturally. No day is really the first day of the rest of your life. Life just is. It could be the first day of a new part of your life, but there’s usually another first day for another new part later down the road.

Today is your life. Every day is your life, first to last.

I guess some of that was in the stuff I showed her, because she brought it up when suggesting I try to write fiction instead, pointing out that writing about real people and your raw thoughts about them wasn’t really interesting to anyone other than the people I was writing about, and they wouldn’t like it.

Whatever. It’s my life.

I have a lot of stories.

When I was little I would scribble letters and fake letters on the walls where other kids would scrawl drawings. A lot of my foster parents didn’t like that, so I guess it was a reason I bounced around a lot. You don’t want to hear about that.

One of my favorite stories is about the parrot that was sold at the market in Baghdad. It could only repeat three phrases. It said “let me fly” when it was hungry, “parrot want a cracker” when it met someone knew and “go away” when it got dark. It was never hungry when it met anyone new who might have been able to set it free, and was as effective a watch bird as anyone could ask for, sounding like an angry old man when anyone got into the room he was in at night.

That’s not a story.

I know.

I’ve read a lot. I like everyone from A--- B------ to Z--- N---- H------. I couldn’t write like that.

I was reading some collections of short stories, a lot of those are in the first person singular, even as the characters change from installment to installment. In any case, the first person singular is superior.

I’ll try anything, I’m desperate.

It’s what I said when I got this most recent job too. It’s not so bad. It’s a big company, so the pay is ok and it has benefits. It’s in midtown so it’s close to everything. I didn’t grow up here, not the big city. I grew up in a different town across the river. And I didn’t have to start in the mail room. That was a joke I made at that first interview. It was a group interview so it was important to make a good impression. I’d gotten hired by the end of the week and started on a Monday.

I don’t like starting anything on a Monday, it’s not good luck, but a lot of things start on Monday anyway.

Pains start on Monday. I’ve had one running up the side of my back into my neck. A pain in the neck. Probably from sleeping poorly.

Tuesday was considered an unlucky day, I think in the Byzantine Empire. I could look it up, but so could you. Maybe it’s when Constantinople fell. Though that would make Tuesday a lucky day to start things. The end of the world could be so local.

The characters in this story are entirely fictitious except for me. Any similarity is entirely coincidental. This concerns the destruction of an empire. A few of the characters are still alive—the rest meet death by violence