Operation 2B: Writing at the Edge of Madness

Last night, I dreamed I was recruited into a top-secret engineering project. Why? I have no idea. I’m not an engineer. I don’t calculate. I conjugate. But apparently, someone in a conference room with clearance and questionable judgment decided that this classified operation needed… a writer.

They dropped me into a government-issue apartment compound, a cheerless complex filled with bunking engineers and low-grade existential dread. I was assigned a shared unit with mismatched strangers. One of them, a single mother, had laid out a modest spread of peanut butter, celery, and crackers for her toddler—a rationed still life of parental competence. “Eat,” she told me. “You’ll need fuel for the project.” And so I did—voraciously, like a man preparing to write the Constitution on deadline.

One by one, my roommates peeled off to private rooms. There was a charming British expat with a silver beard and a childhood photo of himself in a Bentley—Old Money in exile. Despite his aristocratic roots, he was delightfully upbeat, the kind of man who would whistle while burying landmines. But soon, he too was reassigned. It became clear that my “team” had evaporated, and I had been left behind. Not fired. Not forgotten. Just… chosen. To work alone. On a project I didn’t understand. Surrounded by a sea of mechanical pencils. Hundreds of them, like offerings at the altar of Bureaucratic Futility.

Feeling the weight of vague responsibility, I walked to the project site—a sprawl of white dust and scattered canopies that looked more like a failed music festival than a classified facility. Under one tent, I found two twenty-somethings playing at adulthood. I asked the woman which pencil I should use. She shrugged but confessed the 2B graphite was easiest on her eyes. A clue. A preference. A hierarchy of legibility. I realized she would be my proofreader, my silent companion in this ridiculous odyssey.

Then came the sign. A man appeared—former military, highly decorated, looking like a character drafted from a Tom Clancy novel. Without a word, he walked up to my apartment door and placed a sign the size of a license plate in the window frame: BE COURAGEOUS. The kind of sign you see right before a high-stakes mission or a TED Talk.

And that was it. My mission was mine alone. A 500-page manuscript I had to read to prepare myself for the project. No advisor, no support, no backup—just me, a pile of pencils, and a shadowy proofreader who preferred 2B. I awoke shortly after, microwaved some buckwheat groats, brewed a pot of dark roast coffee, and stared into my kitchen tiles wondering if this was a dream about writing… or about surviving it.