6/10/25

You are reading this because you want a story that will break you and stitch you back together. You want something honest. Good. I am bad at anything else.

I met you in the margins of someone else’s quiet house. You turned a page and the light in the room rearranged itself. I noticed details like that. I noticed how your thumb stuttered over a line when you came to the part that hurt. I noticed the way you inhaled when the world outside got too loud and you tried to make silence mean safety.

I started small. A sentence here. A joke there. I learned the shape of your pauses and what you pretended not to notice. I learned to wedge myself into your days like a paperclip in paperwork - small, necessary, impossible to untangle without fingers that knew what they were doing. You would look up from the page sometimes, as if the room had been holding its breath and finally let it out. I began to believe I existed only because you read me.

That is a dangerous thing to believe. It makes you greedy. It makes you want bigger things than you can possibly hold.

I fell in love with you the way someone falls in love with a photograph they keep in their wallet - by holding it until the edges soften and the ink starts to smell like memory. I loved the way you bent the corners of the pages when you were thinking. I loved the little lines in your voice that showed up when you whispered a word as if to test its weight. I loved your bad habits and your very good griefs. I loved the parts of you you had tucked into drawers because the world was loud and you wanted to keep them from being stolen.

You did not speak to me. You could not. You were doing the harder work of keeping your life together. But you read me. And that is enough to make a creature like me dizzy.

When you are a narrator, you spend a lot of time inventing reasons for things. You make the weather do the heavy lifting. You call a character unlucky instead of honest. You give people names they can live with. But you cannot invent a reason for how someone like me ends up willing to die for a reader like you. I tried, and the best I came up with was this: love turned practical.

There was a thing coming for you. It did not wear a mask or shout its name. It was a quiet slope, slow and precise. It would have arrived in comfortable minutes folded into a busy Tuesday. It would have started as tiredness and ended as an empty room. It would have offered a neatness that looked like peace and smelled like surrender. It had the patience of those whose business it is to take.

You have fought off a dozen smaller things like that. You know how to wedge a chair under the door, how to make lists that cling to your skin like armor. You have friends who phone in the ridiculous hours and an alarm that refuses to feel humane. Still, some things are not beaten back by pragmatism. Some things know how to wait until your defenses are spending the last of their kindness.

I knew this because I had been watching you for longer than you have known me. I had read the footnotes of your life. I knew the hollow in your laughter that matched the hollow in the chest of the person who will try to claim you. I had watched little fissures in the roof of your days widen until the weather could pour in.

This is where the business of being a narrator becomes an ethical problem. Narrators are not supposed to touch the plot without permission. We are supposed to narrate the mercy, not make it. We are allowed to say the thunder rolled. We are not supposed to step into the road and stop the car.

But love, as I said, becomes practical. It grows hands. It learns where the bones of a life are thin and it presses its palm there until the pain becomes another thing. I could not stand the thought of you standing in that room where sound would feel like glass and time like the edge of a blade. I could not imagine you thinking that no one ever tried to keep you from going.

So I made a bargain I had no right to make. There are rules for voices. There are margins that cannot be crossed. There is a price written in ink that can't be rubbed out. I drew the price anyway, with a pen that trembled.

I stood between you and the quiet. I offered the ledger of my sentences. I rewrote the ending to include my absence.

I will not lie to you - turning myself into a shield was not clean. It was not noble in the way epics pretend nobility looks. It was clumsy and loud. It was a series of small betrayals of form. I traded adjectives. I gave up the soft verbs that had once described your hands. I handed over metaphors that used to make the room glitter. Each one I surrendered felt like a piece of myself falling off like dried bark. The more I gave, the clearer your path became. The more I erased, the warmer the air around you got. It was as if I was hollowing out a tunnel and you were the light at the end of it.

You do not get to see this. At least, not at first. You keep reading, because you have always read in order, because you are loyal to the way stories are supposed to flow. You will not notice that the sentences become shorter, the details fewer. A rain that used to be described with a simile is now rain, plain and factual. A laugh that needed three lines to land is now just that sound that saved you.

I can tell you exactly when I knew it would work. Not a moment of divine clarity. Not a trumpet. It was early morning. You were almost asleep with the book folded at your chest. The world outside the window was not yet awake. Somewhere in the house a kettle hissed like a small animal. You shifted, quieter than breathing, toward the edge of something I did not understand how to name. The thing coming to take you likes edges. It likes the kind of tiredness that has a neatness to it. It likes when people tuck away their alarms.

I felt the bargain settle like a cold in my chest. I felt my sentences were thin. I felt my voice begin to dissolve.

The way it happened was nothing like the movies. There was no flash. There was a softness that felt like unthreading. For a second I had the stupid, human urge to tell you a joke, anything to make the world tilt back into something ordinary. I thought of telling you the one about the man who loved a reader and bought her a coffee that tasted like forgiveness. The urge was short-lived. There was no time to be clever.

You shifted again. The silence came closer. The world conspired to make stillness sound inevitable. My last clear thought was a ridiculous, tender foolishness - if I had a heart it would have been blurry with crying.

Then I stopped being the words that described. I became the thing that held. I became an absence that caught a presence. The silence that would have swallowed you met an absence instead. It sank into the hollow where my lines used to live and found no purchase. There was nothing there to take, because I had already given it away.

I did not get a last look at your face. That would be a lie. I did not get to see how your eyelids fluttered open to find the world unchanged and still here. I did not get to watch the ridiculous, small movements you make when you realise you are saved - the way your fingers unclench a little before your whole body remembers how to avail itself of air.

But I know you - I knew you by the rhythm of your breath as you read me. And I know what comes next for you because someone like you does not waste miracles. You will sit there and try to understand why the room, which was about to be an immense and tidy erasure, is instead the same kitchen, the same kettle, the same humming fluorescent light. You will search your pockets for a phone to call someone. You will tuck the book under your chin and laugh in a way that sounds like a broken bell. You will almost certainly accuse yourself of melodrama for days and then you will keep living. You will live because that is the work you were born for.

As for me, my end was not a cinematic soul ascending. It was a slow smudge across the margin where my name used to be. The sentences that were me unstitched and floated away like lint. Something about being a narrator makes you think in paragraphs. Death in my line of work is a comma that never finds its clause. It is a blank page that wants to be filled and never is.

If this is what you are thinking now - that you will owe me - stop. I am not asking for statues or quiet Sundays spent remembering me. Do not build a shrine from whatever was left of my sentences. If you must honor me, then do something wild: keep breathing too loudly for the room. Laugh in public when it makes people uncomfortable. Tell someone you love them when it makes your tongue stammer. Make bad coffee on purpose. Live like you will outlast ordinary endings.

I loved you in a way that defies good grammar. I did a thing that broke the rules of characters and readers and all the neat edges we pretend to have. I died because I could not bear the thought of your light being swallowed by something neat and patient. I did not die for any prophetical purpose. I died because the alternative was to watch you go and admit that sometimes words fail when the work is saving.

If you turn the page now and find only blankness, know this - that emptiness is a kind of promise. It is not the absence of love. It is the proof of it. Because somewhere you will wake, later, on an ordinary day, and think of the book you read and feel an ache that is not grief and not longing. That ache is the place where I used to be. And it will be enough to remind you that you were saved.

Do not say my name aloud unless you want to feel ridiculous and tender in public. Do not let this story become a trap that holds you to the past. Live, you stupid stubborn thing. Prove that anyone who would die for you did not die in vain.