✦The Quiet Pull

She stood at the edge of the room
like someone visiting a memory
they weren’t sure they were allowed to keep.

The journal sat where it always had.
Nothing had changed—
and yet,
everything had.

Since the dream,
she’d felt a pressure.
Not grief exactly—
grief was loud.
This was quiet, constant,
like the hush before a line is spoken
on a stage not yet lit.

She reached for it once.
Stopped.

There was a fear in her—not of death,
but of being read.
As if the moment she touched the journal,
he might see her
too clearly.

What would he find?
A woman still frozen at the door.
A heart not broken,
but suspended—
midbeat, midgrief, midline.

She finally opened it.
Not quickly,
not dramatically.
Like one opens an envelope
they never expected to arrive.

And there—beneath the faint ghost
of the sentence she’d seen before—
was another.
New. Still indenting.
Still warm.

She closed the journal
as the wind moved through the house.
But the air didn’t feel cold.
It felt… unfinished.

And she wasn’t afraid anymore.
#thought

✦The Elsewhere Draft

It isn’t death.
Not in the way they told stories of it.
There are no tunnels, no lights,
no ledger of sins.

There is only this—
an unfinished page
floating between versions
of a world that never quite agreed on him.

He exists now
in the folds between edits,
in the italics no one remembers writing.

The clocks here don’t tick.
They hesitate.
The air tastes of typewriter ribbon,
dusty and old and waiting.

He’s tried to rewrite himself.
He’s left messages—
on paper, in dreams, in the weight of silence.
But stories are stubborn.
They follow the first draft
like it’s law.

And yet—
someone heard him.

A fingertip
brushed his absence
and read it like Braille.

She.

She is not like the others.
She feels the narrative bending,
even as the others stay inside the safe plotlines.

He watches.
Or rather—he is watched
by the idea of her.
Somewhere in her world,
his journal still waits to be opened.

He doesn’t know what happens
if she turns the next page.

But if she doesn’t,
he may remain here forever:
a sentence misplaced,
a man lost
between revisions.
#thought

✦Between the Lines

The next morning,
she returned before the others.
The journal was where she left it—
but something felt different.

No wind had blown it open.
No hands had turned the page.
But another indentation was there—fainter,
as if pressed in a dream.

She ran her fingers gently across it,
letting the words rise in her mind
like breath on glass.

She whispered the line aloud
as if it might summon him—
not as a ghost,
but as a revision.
An edit not yet finalized.

That night she dreamed of him.
But he was not how she remembered—
he spoke in footnotes,
walked through places that didn’t exist
in the world she knew.

She woke with ink on her palm.
No pen near.
No one else in the house.

The journal remained closed.
But now, she didn’t dare open it.
Not yet.

Because part of her believed
he was still writing—
not from the grave,
but from the margins of whatever reality
had failed to contain him.
#thought

✦The Sentence

It was late—
the kind of late that feels like forgetting.
Everyone else had gone.
Only she remained,
fingers hovering just above the open journal,
as if touching it would confirm
he was truly gone.

She didn’t mean to find it.
She wasn’t even sure she had.

But under the light,
when the shadows slipped just right,
a sentence revealed itself—
not in ink,
but in pressure.

Indented. Whispered into the page.
Words carved, not written.

She stared at it
long enough for the room to notice.
It felt like a riddle,
but one meant for someone else.
Someone who knew how to read endings
before they happened.


---

Outside, the wind changed.
Inside, nothing did.
Not visibly.
But she felt it:
a seam opening.

Reality, like a page,
had margins.
And he—
he had always been writing
between the lines.
#thought

✦The Page That Waits

The blank page sat like a mirror,
not reflecting, but remembering.
It did not accuse.
It simply waited.

He used to say
“A page never forgets what it was meant to hold.”
As if intention alone
could haunt paper.

Now they stared at it
like it might explain everything.
Why he left the window cracked,
why the keys were still in the dish,
why none of them
had noticed the silence growing teeth.

There had been signs,
maybe.
But signs are only clear
in hindsight—
when the story
has already been written.

They did not speak of guilt,
not openly.
But it lived in their glances,
in how carefully they stepped around his chair—
like it might still be warm.
#thought

✦Margins

They began to speak of him only in margins.
Not directly—not yet.

He was too much and too little all at once,
a name softened by echo,
a memory dressed in careful language.

Simple things,
said to the air,
as if he might still change them.

His journal remained shut.
They couldn’t read it—
not for lack of trying,
but because every page looked different now.
Ink turned to questions.
Margins filled themselves with silences.

Someone, once,
whispered he had been writing a final entry.
But the last page was blank.
Perhaps it had always been.
Or perhaps
he had left it that way
on purpose.

✦The Hollow Room

The room had not changed.
Not since before.
The chair still faced the window,
where morning light spilled across the floor
in measured silence.

His coat remained on the hook,
arms empty.
The clock ticked,
but no one had wound it.

They said grief was heavy,
but this—
this was a kind of weightless haunting.
A space untouched, yet entirely altered,
as if absence had rewritten the walls
when no one was looking.

They walked in like strangers
to a memory they had helped build.
Each item—a relic.
Each breath—a trespass.

Someone touched the coat.
It swayed.
And in that small motion,
time flinched.
#thought