Salami and Peppermints

"Have you ever tried salami and peppermints?" Kline asked me when we met yesterday at Panera bread. 

To my surprise, he hadn't yet taken a bite out of the front page yet. I blinked, thinking of an answer but all I said was, "So no newspaper today?"

The brunette seemed to ignore this question and merely repeated his. "Well have you?" he added. 

I shook my head. "No. That combination never really crossed my mind. It sounds...unique."

A euphemism. 

Kline shrugged his shoulders, broad for someone so lanky. Then he ripped the front page off of the newspaper, and stuffed it into his mouth. I watched as he chewed thoughtfully.

He swallowed and said. "Well you should, you know. Its a different taste, very...unique." He smirked as he threw my own words back at me. 

I raised an eyebrow. "Maybe one of these days I'll try it. Perhaps I can fit it into my schedule of doing absolute nothing during the day."

"Welcome to the club," Kline said to me, raising his cup of black coffee in a mock toast.

"Shouldn't you be doing something," I asked, suddenly curious about this kid's life. "Like going to school part time or working?"

"I do work," Kline answered with another shrug of his shoulders.

"Doing what?"

"I'm a writer."

I'm a writer too, if you can call short stories crammed into a disintegrating notebook writing. "What exactly do you write?"

"Whatever I feel like. Somedays, its poems and haikus. Other days, I write a piece of music. And on Fridays, always on Fridays, I write two sentences to add to my short story."

"How long is you short story?"

"As of now, its around ten pages."

I raise my eyebrow again. "Must've taken you a long time."

"Not really." He pauses, taking an alternate bite of his onion bagel and the front page of the newspaper. "My story takes place in a dream. The first two paragraphs of the story are blank."

"Blank?"

"To create a dream like space."

"My dreams are usually filled to the brim with action of some sort."

Kline shook his head. "No. When you first enter this new dimension in you mind, nothing happens. Have you ever noticed that?"

"Not really. I'm asleep."

"There's this big blank space of nothingness, all white, if you can give this space a color in order to describe the absence of everything. After this, your dream comes, it is birthed into this space."

"I never thought of that."

"That's what this white space at the beginning of the story represents. The reader enters this new dream like dimension along with the protagonist of the story. To create a parallel universe in some ways."

"It makes sense," I said.

"I hope so. I just kind of wrote it randomly."

"So what happens after that?"

"I build the landscape of this dreamworld. In this story, its a town of estranged humans who are ignorant of the fact that they're estranged. The whole story is based on a dream and an allegory."

"An allegory?" I asked, after swallowing a piece of newspaper. "Is it a specific one?"

"Plato's allegory of the cave," Kline answered. He asked me if I've ever heard of it and I reply with a 'yes'. "Well its the whole wheel for the entire dream."

"So its almost like a story within a story."

"I guess so."

We sit in silence for two, maybe three minutes before I ask him, "Do you come here every day?"

Kline nodded. "I do. I bring twenty, maybe thirty bucks and buy food throughout the day. I stay here until five."

"You just do that?" I aksed incredulously. "You just sit here every day, all day? Doesn't it get boring?"

"When I find something more interesting to do, I guess I'll do it."

I faintly think of myself, sitting in front of the television, watching HGTV all day and looking through my ten editions of "Cottage Living". Something more interesting? What if there wasn't? What if I couldn't find something more interesting to do? 

Kline, seemingly having read my mind, said, "I may never find anything more interesting to do. But that's the fun of this."

"Of what?"

"Of doing the same thing day in and day out. I'm waiting. Waiting for something to change, something to give, something to break and cause a completely different situation than what I do everyday."

I watched him pensively, taking in his very striking words.

"When that something happens, when that something magnificent and magnanimous happens, it'll make up for all the waiting."

"And you won't feel as though you've wasted any time?" I asked him.

"I'm not wasting time. I'm waiting."