✦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