A work of fiction, tentatively titled "Another Side," Part I

The following comes with no promises or guarantees as to when, if ever, it will be continued or concluded.

To Whom It may Concern,

Although you have never met me, rest assured that you know me. You have borne witness to several jumbled fragments of my existence, as I have to yours. We are connected, you and I. I know not how and I know not why.
I begin with this proclamation of ignorance in the hopes that you will not distract yourself by attempting to answer the questions, or worse yet, attempting to glean the answers from my tale. They are not there. I say this with such confidence because I have tried, and failed, to discern those same answers from the fragments of your experience with which I have collided on so many occasions.

I am sure many others like myself have attempted to do what I am doing now – to transmit in some orderly fashion a message to someone or something that they cannot truly touch. And no, we are not sure if you are merely figments (intentionally created or otherwise) or if you really do exist somewhere. There are opinions, and opinions differ. The majority of us feel you must exist, much as the majority of your cohorts feel we must not. I have my theories as to this opposition. From what I have seen, your people have adapted in such a way that the intersection of your desire and your will and your stray thoughts are pushed out into your world, and the decision is made quite early, and not wholly voluntarily, if you will birth something real or something imaginary. Somehow, and here the details truly escape me, there seems to be a firm consensus (most of the time) as to what truly is.

My people are… very different.

The end result, after all the talking and hypothesizing, is that we each must surely seem to you to be just another droplet in a steady stream of fictions and illusions. To us you seem a separate world, frightening and bizarre, but still a world in that complete and very proper sense. You fascinate us. You bore us. You enrage and entertain us. You baffle us. All this, of course, when we can be bothered to pay attention at all.

I speak with great confidence about your world, but doing so does not make me much different from any of my kind. If this were the end of things, I would scribble out these words due to some unknowable desire and push them out, most likely unsuccessfully, into the stormy, soupy swamps where swirl about the fragments of your world.

This is not, however, the end of things. I have been patient, and I have been still. I have learned to filter out the tremendous noise of my world, and open myself to the possibility that when you peer into my world, something here shifts. I have allowed myself to believe that the presence of a new observer, so strange and so foreign, shifts in some discernible way the reality of the observed. I will try to communicate as though to a haunting thing peering over my shoulder, one who, if I overtly recognize its presence in any way, will disappear. I will play to the unseen eyes that, for all I know, could be watching my world through my own.

I know how difficult this will be, and again in this regard I speak with great confidence about you and your world.

There are three paths which can lead a person to such confidence. The first, of course, is ignorance, or more precisely, ignorance coupled with a blind faith. The second is reason. The last is experience.

For most of my existence I have been wary of those around me. Faith of any kind is the most dangerous of snares, and I have been fortunate enough to avoid them for this long at least. I have been skeptical of many things, and although I fancy myself to be reasonable, I can hardly claim to have followed the path of reason to this perch from which I make my proclamations. No, I speak with great confidence about your world because I have traveled that least-traveled of paths: the longest, the strangest, and the most literal. I have been there.

Like a friend who came halfway around the world to your very town, and yet neglected to travel the one extra mile to your door, I went to your world. From there you know me not, but you know me nonetheless.

The logical question for you to ask is, why didn’t I find you? The answer is, because although I knew much about you and your existence, I had no way to transmit that knowledge meaningfully to anyone else. I had seen many pictures, of your face and of your friends and of the places you had been, but I carried no physical totems. As a stranger in this world of yours I’m not sure I would have succeeded even if I had. And finally, strangely, almost comically, I lacked that one magical key that unlocks so many doors in your plotted-out world. I write this message to Whom it May Concern because, for all the images I can conjure in my mind’s eye, I have never heard anyone, not anyone, ever utter your name.

This state of affairs is also quite perverse, you see, because I do not have a name at all.