As a child Greg had always been a dreamer. Living in his own world, spending more time imagining how things would turn out instead of actually doing anything to achieve those outcomes. That way life had been peaceful and passive, flowing like an undisturbed stream that got separated from the river by pure accident.

Living like that wasn't risky at all, it required no sacrifices and Greg was content with that. Each time an opportunity appeared he spent days recreating all the outcomes in his head all the while the real opportunities flew by. He liked it that way. In his opinion, those who struggled to achieve something in life were the ones who did not understand what life was all about.

He had found himself a job that would provide just enough pay to rent a tiny apartment and afford two meals a day. Something that most of the population wouldn't have been satisfied with. But Greg never bothered with such meagre things, what mattered to him was that he had a place to stay, nothing more, nothing less. Where he stayed never mattered because by that point he had lived thousands of lives in his own head and that was more than enough to compensate for his awful apartment.

One night while he had been on his shift, a co-worker tried to strike up a conversation. "So how'd you end up here? Not many people dream to be night shift workers at a gas station in the middle of nowhere."

Some time had passed since Greg actually came up with an answer and during that time he had already lived through ten possible ways the conversation could have went. "I don't know, the pay is good I guess." He answered and lost himself in his thoughts again. For him imagination was like a drug, he couldn't go a day without it.

"Yeah I guess so." His co-worker replied. He noticed that Greg's answer was completely mechanical and that he said something solely for the purpose of saying it. Realizing that there would be no further talking, he finished his cigarette and went inside. All the while Greg stood there in silence not even noticing that he had been standing alone for a while.

Arriving home from his short night shift, he switches on the warm lighting of his apartment. Papers and broken pieces of led were scattered across the floor. He didn't have much furniture aside from a desk as he only saw others as waste of space that could've been taken up by his work.

Putting down his bag, he laid on the floor with a stretch. Papers flew in the air and landed on his torso and face. He enjoyed scribbling down any ideas he had throughout the day and laying them in a pile. That way, he doesn't expect which idea will hit him today.

Today's idea was of a fisherman who was aiming to catch food for his bedridden son. It wasn't quite the plot he enjoyed, so to dilate the amount of realism, he'd often add fantasy elements.

Taking the piece of paper, he put it on his desk and began to write the rest of the story. Though it was near the witch's hour, his heart still beat in excitement and adrenaline. It was as if he was living in the stories themselves, feeling what the characters feel, and the sensations of the environment he describes around him.

After a couple hours, he leans back in his chair, satisfied with another finished plot line, putting it in his drawer with the rest of his manuscripts.

With an absent gaze, his mind wanders again as he stares up at the ceiling. He doesn't know why he continues to live the way he does. Writing so many stories that'll most likely never see the light of day. Perhaps it was an escape from the real world, to erase any realism in his life, he turns to his imagination, filled with unrealistic standards.

Greg had always wondered what sparked this fire in him, was it a false interest, a scrape to his knee, or maybe imitating somebody he looked up to. He just couldn't recall the first time he wrote a story.

And like any other thoughts, these ones stayed in his head for a couple of minutes before he turned his attention to something else. He jumped down onto the mattress and continued staring into the celling.

Some time had passed but the outside world was still veiled in darkness with no Sun in sight. There were two solid hours before the sunrise and Greg knew that he did not have to work that day so he kept on staring at the celling.

An idea had suddenly struck. He bolted up and landed into his creaky wooden chair like someone had been chasing him. Rummaging around the desk he managed to pull out a half-sharpened pencil with a barely functional eraser still attached to it. For someone so carefree, he hated making mistakes.

Then the search for a blank piece of paper began. Pushing aside everything else from the desk, he crumpled up some papers in a futile attempt to minimize the chaos that surrounded him. Despite his efforts those pieces of paper, regardless of his intentions, would always end up on the floor. Creating another mess that he will never clean up.

Because he had spent a good few minutes searching for an empty piece of paper, the idea started to slip out of his mind. Not letting go of it so easily, he opened the drawer and pulled out a paper that already contained an unfinished story from who knows when and started writing the idea down on the other side.

By the time he had finished it, the Sun had appeared on the horizon. That meant little to him. Time had never been something that he worried about. Greg thought that whether or not someone paid attention to it was irrelevant because in the end it was all a human concept. He believed that just like he gets sudden inspirations for his stories, that same way someone got an idea to create time. For reasons he could not explain, Greg believed that if he were to act upon someone else's idea's, in this case, the idea of time, he would be following another man's path. Thus he rarely bothered with anything else that did not come from his own head. There were exceptions to that rule of course but only those that he had deemed necessary.

Greg began to recall distant memories of his childhood. Despite growing up in a two parent household, he never quite found a connection with either of his parents. Most of the time, he would be out of the house, looking at various bugs and nature sites. His mind was a curious case, able to absorb vast amounts of knowledge through his bodily senses. He'd often enjoy his time sitting on a solitary rock, translating his senses into mental environments.

The touch of a tree, the feel of the wind, even the taste of the air. It seemed as though he could never forget any moment in time, but despite that, his mind had a gaping hole he couldn't fill, a blurry sequence of memories.

His father had always been somewhat lackluster in Greg's eyes. Any amount of effort or presentation only seemed to garner a faint mumble from the man. However, that's when Greg learned that no matter how big or small an effort, it'd always be the same result. He could obtain the same approval from minimal effort.

On the contrary, his mother seemed to be a mass of hot air, circulating around her at all times. Greg didn't like to get close to either, but he'd much rather choose his quiet father over her.

It was a fateful day in middle school. Greg had finished putting his books in his locker before putting on his shoes and walking home. Out of the corner of his eye, he spots movement from the alley.

Alas nothing caught his attention. Whatever had been going on there did not invoke any kind of intrigue in his mind. When he had already made some distance from the alley, he had even forgotten that something had been there. The present moment did not matter at all, Greg already had better things to attend to. The stories in his mind.

While walking home he had come up with ten different stories on what could have been going on in the alley. But only one held his attention for longer than a few minutes. He called it "Lost and Found". Greg had kept repeating the main idea behind the story over and over until he got home.

He carefully arranged his shoes, placed his backpack on a stool but before that he had already prepared tomorrows books and replaced them, at last he hung his jacket. Moving throughout his house he went through the living room first where his father had been reading some foreign book. He had acknowledged Greg's arrival and nodded at him. A simple gesture was worth more than a thousand words in his fathers opinion. Greg's mother though was nowhere to be found, and he did not bother to seek her out. Finally he went to his room and got everything ready to start writing.

Several hours have passed since Greg began writing, but there was only one problem, he could not move past the first page. When he began the story everything made sense, the alley, the stranger inside of it offering unforgettable experience, the madman who stumbles upon that same stranger, their erratic conversation. Every single detail was accounted for, but he still couldn't move past the first page.

Night had already engulfed his house but he didn't make any progress. Each sentence he would write, he would immediately come back and erase it. Nothing was good, but what he had buried deep inside of him and was never willing to come to terms with, was that nothing will ever be as good as his imagination and daydreaming made it out to be.

In Greg's head everything was a movie, every little detail made sense and it was perfect. Absolutely perfect. The characters were alive and breathing, living in his head and doing whatever their destiny was. Whole planets, continents, cities, villages, everything was bustling with life or death, depending on the story. Despite all that complexity, no story was ever good enough when it needed to be put on paper. In the end, Greg had decided that it would be the best if the story had found its place amongst many more that were hiding in his desk drawer.

Greg's still body made a lump in the piles of scattered paper on his apartment floor, slowly rising and falling in sync. It was a quiet night, not a sound could be heard aside from faint breathing.

Then, when the clock struck exactly 7:13 PM, Greg's eyes shot open as he rolled himself upright, papers flying all around him. It wasn't exactly because it became 7:13 PM that he had woken up, but that his body felt like it. He never followed a strict sleep schedule, believing that his own body knew when the time was right. He had grown comfortable to only four hours of sleep per night.

With a deep breath, he held out both of his hands in front of him, fingers sprawled out. Greg counted one by one as he put them down. It was his daily finger exercise; he couldn't stand it if they were dull when writing.

"Good, I can start."

With that, Greg grabbed a pen and paper and began to write about the dream he had, mostly noting about the fog in it. Since it was also his day off, he could tune out any distractions as he wrote.

***

It was 9:31 PM and Greg had finished over fifty pages of the story. Though he couldn't recall most of the dream, it seemed as though his imagination filled in the rest for the next forty-five pages.

The longest story Greg had ever written was over two thousand pages, but unfortunately, he had lost most of them in the piles of paper around his apartment. He didn't think much to store them properly when he was writing since his mind seemed to be in another place. The least he could've done was mark with them numbers.

Greg took a moment to fall onto the floor, but the home phone quickly interrupted his short brainstorming session. He wouldn't often get calls this late.

Crawling over to the phone, he answered. It was his boss from the gas station.

"Hey Greg, sorry for calling so late on your day off, but I just wanted to let you know that I have a special job for you tomorrow. I'll tell you more about it when you clock in."

He was confused. After all, he had never been important enough at work to be assigned a special mission. Greg's mind began to race again with possibilities he'll surely write about.

"Sure, I'll see you then."

Hanging up the phone, Greg lays back on the floor again, new ideas sprouting. 'Maybe I'll get sent across country.'

Knowing that now he had something to attend to, Greg, for the first time in a long time, went to bed early.

The next morning, he was woken up by his ringtone. "Who could it be this early?" Greg thought because when he had looked out of his apartment window, night was still very much present.

"Greg! Where the hell are you!? Did I not tell you yesterday that I have a special task for you? Its already midnight and you were supposed to be there three hours ago! Get your ass down here and do it fast!" His boss was furious, who knew that such a calm man could get so angry.

Despite all the yelling over the phone, Greg was unbothered. He had learned early on that any stressful situation in life could be handled much better if approached with patience. Thus he did not feel any urge to change his usual pace. After all, he had planned to live for a hundred years minimum, and that required a lot of patience. But while he was trying to find where he had put his clothes, he wondered what kind of job was waiting for him. What kind of special mission could one come up with at a remote gas station. Greg had started to daydream again and his mind birthed a dozen new stories just by the time it took him to get ready. Before leaving he wanted to write down one of his more interesting idea, but as soon as he grabbed his pencil, all of them vanished. He let out a sigh and exited his apartment.

When he arrived at the gas station, at 1:30PM, no one was there. Greg wondered if he had taken the wrong bus and ended up at a different one but he was not forgetful nor foolish despite his easy going nature. He entered the back office that had been nested between the storage room and the toilet, but the office had been empty too. Something was fishy, despite that he came up with three different stories as to why the situation was the way it was.

After half hour he searched the whole place. Not a single soul in sight. Baffled for the first time in his life, Greg thought that his boss was surely pranking him because he was late.

As Greg sat on the floor, his feet aching, he could hear a faint metal clanging outside. He peeked through the blinds that led to the dumpsters, and in an instant, his eyes widened to the sight of his boss holding up a shovel, scooping up trash.

He didn't realize his boss was so hands-on; he'd usually be napping in the office most days. Greg opened the door to the alleyway.

His boss whipped around and saw him, shovel over the shoulder. "Ah, Greg. Took ya long enough," he said as a bead of sweat dripped down his chin. "Here, take a shovel."

The shovel rattled against the pavement as Greg's boss kicked it to him. He didn't have any words to say, but the revelation at his boss being someone mysterious lit him up inside.

Why was he doing it alone when he'd usually get Mable to do it for him. Was it some secret service he'd do for the community, an unsung hero?

The boss looked at Greg's daze and raised his voice. "Hurry up, would ya?"

Greg returned to reality and hurriedly picked up the shovel. "Right, sorry about that, boss."

For the next thirty minutes, the only sounds that could be heard from the store weren't bustling customers coming for donuts or other gas station food, but the metal scrapping of two men with shovels.

Greg's shirt became drenched in sweat. He wasn't one to neglect his physical health, but he didn't train his stamina very much. The alley looked cleaner than ever, even if Mable had done it.

However, aside from that, Greg noted a strange interaction when he tried looking inside one of the dumpsters. His boss quickly pulled him back and berated him to not look inside.

'What's he hiding? Is it a body wrapped in trash bags? Did he toss away his wedding ring, he's married, right?'

Greg thought up of countless possibilities once again, falling into a daze.

His boss let go of the shovel as it fell to the ground before taking a seat and wiping his forehead with a towel. "That's good enough, Greg. I'm giving you the rest of the day off."

Greg positioned himself upright and thanked him, trodding away as he bubbled with excitement.