✦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.