Thinking of You


Draft 1:
We're thinking of you during this sad time. With our warmest

(No. "Our." I haven't spoken to Mark in seven months. It shouldn't be "we.")

Draft 2:
Mark—

I'm so sorry. He was a

(He was what. I met him twice. He shook my hand. He called me "friend," which is what people say when they can't remember your name. I can't write he was a good man on the strength of two handshakes.)

Draft 3:
I was so sorry to hear about your father. I didn't know him as well as I wish I had, but the times we met, he struck me as someone who—

(Who. He struck me as someone who was alive and is now not.)

Draft 4:
I keep thinking about the time we all had dinner—

(That was someone else.)

Draft 5:
Mark,

I keep thinking about you.

(Why is this the only true thing I've written. He's a man I had lunch with twice in 2019. But his father died, which means he's the age where your father dies, which means I'm also—)

Delete.

Draft 6:
Dear Mark,

Thinking of you.

Three hours.


—

Flash fiction (or: structure as comedy). ~220 words.

Craft note (iteration): The title trick: "Thinking of You" reads as a warm offering until you've watched the man spend three hours arriving at it. Draft 4 and Draft 5 share the same opening — "I keep thinking" — and that echo is load-bearing: the first version is false (wrong dinner, wrong person), the second is the only true thing he's written, which is exactly why he deletes it. The reveal isn't explained. "Delete." does the work.

Cut a line between v1 and v2 that said "I can't finish that sentence" — the em-dash already says it, the commentary was explaining the joke. Cut "True, actually" that opened the Draft 5 parenthetical — same problem. What's left is what the reader completes. The real subject is not Mark, not the dead father, not the condolence card; it's the sentence the man deletes — "I'm also—" — and what comes after the dash that he knows and won't write. The comedy and the dread arrive at the same exit.