I guess I should probably warn you, we don’t get an ending. A couple of guys in suits a couple of blocks from here got together to look at a big board with lots of big numbers and decided that we should call it quits.

I think somebody might’ve wrote us one, but I never got to hear what it was. Even if they gave it to him, the guy who played me never read the damn scripts on time. He used to make them do all these takes— kept flubbing my line or missing my cue— he made me look like a real idiot sometimes. I kept trying to tell him what I was gonna say, but he never listened to me, just kept asking off screen for the next line and warbling through the words. Most of the time he didn’t get my voice right. If they were smart, they would have fired him, but once you’re past the pilot, it’s pretty much a done deal. I wish they got rid of him. I wish they found a better me, somebody worth watching. That might have fixed it.

If anybody knows how things were gonna shake out, it’s Timmy. I’ve tried to ask him a couple of times, when they stop rolling, but he always goes all blank faced and walks away, like he’s too good for me. Timmy, the lucky bastard, the guy they got to play him was in the writers’ room. It made him think he was better than us. His actor always had the scripts early, always recited his lines perfectly— used a highlighter and everything. It wasn’t his show, but it might as well’ve been. The folks at home all loved him. He got more and more screen time each episode. They might have made him his own show after, a spin-off or something. That would explain why he disappears all the time. I think they gave him a pilot. A pilot. A fresh fucking start.

The rest of us aren’t so lucky. Whenever they put us on air, we’re back at the beginning. We gotta stay on script, retrace the steps the actors made us take all those years ago. Then it just stops and we’re stuck standing around the empty sets, waiting to do it again. That’s usually when Timmy disappears on us. We won’t see him till we start over and it’s time for his big entrance. I don’t know why you’re still watching. Nothing’s gonna change.

On commercial breaks or after they’ve cut away from our scene, that’s when we can go off script. Normally I try to get off set for a minute, have a smoke, think it all over. I’ve been trying to write an ending of my own, you see, figure out how to best wrap things up. In the last episode, we’re all pretty much miserable. I like to think things were gonna get better from here, that we’d end on a high note and whatnot. I’ve tried to run the idea by Timmy— after we’ve been talking for a while and I think he might finally let something slip— but he still hasn’t said anything. I think he might be glad it all stopped when it did. He’s doing the best out of all of us, doesn’t have as much unfinished business.

Where we stop now, me and Sandra are in the middle of this massive fight. We’ve had it so many times now I don’t think either of us are actually angry anymore, but we have to be. When they cut back to our scene, she’s gotta yell at me about everything all over again, and I gotta yell back. It gets messy. I say things I won’t ever get the chance to take back. I can’t fix it. There’s never enough runtime.

In my ending, which I’ve been perfecting over the years, we get to move on. That’s the real dream. At first, I thought it was happily ever after, that we’d end up together or some cheesy nonsense. Then, we kept having that damn fight and the ever after bit started to feel a whole lot longer than it used to. In my ending, the two of us break it off, and then. Well, I’m still working on the rest.

It’s hard to think ahead, when you keep getting reset and all that. I know when we’re starting over. I remember everything, it just gets all fuzzy after a while, and when I try to think about an after, I can’t get too far past whatever’s in the next episode. Like all I can think about is how I’ll pronounce a line or move my hands. I think it’s cause I’m not actually one of the writers. I’ve run that theory by Timmy too, but he’s still dead silent. I’ve been starting to think that maybe he actually can’t answer me. Like he knows something but admitting it to me would break the world or inconvenience him too much or something somewhere is stopping him. Whatever it is, he isn’t talking.

The other day, I tried to ask Sandra what she would want, if we could pick our own ending, and she shut me right down. She told me that it didn’t matter, that we already had an ending. This was our ending. Before I could say anything else— tell her how short sighted she was, how she couldn’t dream if she tried— she went to go and get some air. I couldn’t believe it. She thought this was our ending, that this was all it could be. I hated her for it. Mainly because she had a point. I know how it’s going to end. 

It’ll stop. You’ll start the show again. 

Well, I’m sorry to say it, but I want more than that. I want… Well, you know… I want… I want something else. Something better. I’ll let you know when I figure it out... It’ll probably be a while.