Things were pretty slow at my little café today. From morning until night, I could count the customers on my fingers. Well, at least I still had enough fingers to count them all, both on my hands and my feet.
I let out a fairly big, slightly prolonged sigh. “Where is everyone? It’s unusually quiet.”
I wasn’t complaining because of the lack of income. It was more that there wasn’t enough to do to distract me and turn into a long-term asset.
“Unusually quiet.”
“Yeah, unusually quiet—” I turned toward my customer, a man named Mr. Agam. “Oh, Mr. Agam.”
He was a young adult who, if I remembered correctly, was twenty-nine now. His appearance was always somewhere between rumpled and disheveled. A yellow T-shirt that seemed to have lost all its cheerful charm, three-quarter-length pants, and sandals in two different colors.
Mr. Agam had been my first customer when I started this little café. He’d been a regular for seven years—and his messy style of dress had stayed exactly the same. I’d also noticed that he always carried a phone older than mine, and with the skill of well-trained thumbs... he typed an awful lot of words.
“Mr. Agam, can I ask for some advice?”
“Hm?” He pressed a few buttons on the screen, then stopped completely, as if he’d just finished an actual task. “What is it?”
“First of all, I’ve been pretty curious, sir...” I brewed a little coffee. “You always look so busy with your phone. What are you doing on it?”
“Ohoho...” His little laugh made me hope even more for a satisfying answer. “Just writing.”
“Writing?”
“Yeah, writing.”
“Writing what?”
“Umm...” He paused briefly. “Some kind of story.”
I was both surprised and confused. “A story... what do you mean?”
“You know, making up a story.”
“A novel?”
“Exactly.”
I became even more confused. “Wait, don’t you have to write novels on a computer or something?”
“Technology’s getting more advanced, so there’s a phone version now.”
“Really?”
Mr. Agam showed me his phone’s screen. Despite its age, it was still perfectly usable.
The screen he showed me displayed the home page of an online service for writing and reading novels.
Huh? I’d never heard of that. It had been pretty popular for a while back then, but I’d wanted absolutely nothing to do with it.
“I had no idea.”
“Well, this app isn’t as famous as the one where you just keep swiping upward on the screen.”
I knew how addictive that app was, which was exactly why I avoided it too.
“So, sir, is there some kind of training I need to take, or something I have to do to get good at it?”
“Hahaha...” He laughed with satisfaction. “You just need to read the stories that have been shown on television or in theaters.”
“Read movies?”
“Yeah. Actually, some of the movies we watch on television or in theaters... are adaptations of novels.”
“Whoa...” I was pretty impressed. Apparently, that kind of knowledge was completely new to me.
Seriously, what era was I born in?
“Sorry, sir, can we make money from writing those stories?”
“If they’re good and worth reading, then of course you can.”
“So, Mr. Agam, how much do you make a month?”
“Not a lot, but not a little either. Enough to cover my basic needs.”
Considering how simple Mr. Agam’s family’s life was, I supposed that made sense.
“So... what should I write, sir?”
“Whatever you want.”
Wait, he was just leaving it up to me? It was true that I sometimes wanted to write something, but I always stopped and backed down because I considered it pointless.
“Heh...” I gave a low laugh. “I mean, don’t you have any suggestions?”
“When you’re watching an action movie...” Mr. Agam paused to glance at a notification on his screen. “Have you ever felt like creating your own version of the story to compete with it?”
“Yeah, I have!” I answered enthusiastically.
“Then you already have an imagination that can be expressed in another form.”
I fell silent, trying to carefully process what Mr. Agam had said.
“Expressing your imagination doesn’t have to mean drawing pictures. You can do it through writing.”
“But, sir—I don’t have any skill in that area yet.”
“It’s not that you don’t have the skill. You’ve simply never dared to take the first step.”
He had a point. I was just someone who had been given chance after chance but kept refusing to take them.
“So you can write down your imagination, whatever it is! Just make it as interesting as possible.”
Mr. Agam’s advice made sense. Rather than doing nothing while things were this slow... it turned out I could still do something more useful.
I could build a digital asset. The road ahead would be incredibly steep, but if I didn’t force myself to take it... I’d never know.