The Vandalism of a Ghost
— -
I didn't open the window the next morning either.
The air in the room was starting to feel human. Stale, maybe. But warm in a way I hadn't decided how to feel about yet. I sat at the desk for a long time, just looking at the Black Notebook. Three years of charcoal and ash. Every poem I ever wrote that was too honest to say out loud. It was the place Vatsal went to die so Hotoke could exist — and it had worked, mostly, which is the whole problem.
Every time I picked up the pen, I felt the pins and needles again. In my fingers. Up my wrists. My nerves were awake now and they were refusing — flat out refusing — to write about the beauty of the void. Like they knew something I didn't. Like they were tired of playing dead.
I left the pen on the desk. I went to the garden instead.
The city was doing its usual thing. Horns. People moving like they had somewhere urgent to be. I walked and every sound felt like it was hitting me with no buffer, no armor. I kept waiting for the cold to numb it back but it didn't. The cold just felt like cold now. Not a refuge. Just weather.
She was already there.
Elira wasn't wearing the yellow coat today. Dark scarf, long, wrapped twice around her neck. She had a book open in her lap but she wasn't reading — she was watching a pigeon argue with a piece of bread. When she heard me sit down she looked up, and she didn't say hi, and she didn't ask how I was.
She looked at my hands.
"You're not wearing gloves."
"No."
"Okay," she said, like that was an answer to something. She went back to the pigeon.
I sat there for a while with my bag in my lap. The notebook was inside it. I'd brought it without thinking, or maybe I'd thought too much and convinced myself it was nothing, just something to do with my hands. It didn't matter. It was there.
I took it out.
Then I put it back.
I watched the pigeon win. I watched Elira turn a page she probably wasn't reading. The bench was cold through my jeans and I thought about leaving, actually made a plan for leaving, calculated the exact number of steps back to my building and how long before my room would feel like a room again instead of a box.
I took the notebook out again. Held it. The cover was worn at the corner where I always pressed my thumb when I was thinking, which meant there was a small pale crescent there now, like a moon someone had rubbed halfway off.
"You wanted to know why I'm like this," I said. My voice came out strange. Steadier than I felt. "Why I like the winter."
She turned to look at me.
I held it out. "It's all in there."
There was a moment where she didn't take it — just looked at it in my hand — and I almost pulled it back. I almost said never mind, it's nothing, forget it. I had the words fully loaded. I know because I could feel them sitting at the back of my throat like stones.
She took it.
I looked away. I stared at the sky, which was doing nothing interesting, just being grey, which at least was honest. I heard the pages turn. I didn't count them. I had written some things in that notebook that I had never said to another person, things I had written at 3am thinking no one would ever see them, which was supposed to be the whole point — the privacy of it, the grave of it — and she was reading them now on a bench next to a pigeon.
I pressed my thumb into the worn corner of my knee instead. Old habit. Different surface.
She didn't flinch. That was the thing I kept not expecting. People usually — well. It doesn't matter what people usually do. She was reading about the boy who thought he was made of glass and she was not putting the book down and she was not making that face, the face that means I don't know what to do with this. She was just reading. Slowly. Like she had time for it. Like my wreckage was something worth slowing down for.
It was the most terrifying thing I had ever survived.
The Blue Pen
She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a cheap blue ballpoint pen. The plastic kind. The kind you steal from a bank counter and forget in your jacket for six months.
"What are you doing," I said. Not a question. More like something fell out of my mouth.
"Editing," she said.
She was already turning pages. She found the one I knew she'd find — a poem called The Absolute Zero, written at some point last January when the cold had gotten into a place cold has no business being. It ended with a line I had been privately proud of for the wrong reasons:
There is no heat left in this room, and I have forgotten how to ask for fire. Stopped. — and you don't have to ask anyway. I already brought some.
She clicked the pen. Drew one thick blue line through the word forgotten. Above it, in handwriting that was a little rushed and slightly crooked, like she wrote the way she talked — like the thought was moving faster than her hand could keep up — she put: stopped.
Then at the bottom of the page, after everything: and you don't have to ask anyway. I already brought some.
She didn't look at me when she did it. That's the part I couldn't get past. She wasn't performing it for my reaction. She was just — doing it. Like it was obvious. Like she'd seen a typo and fixed it.
"You're ruining it," I said. My voice had gone very quiet. I wasn't sure what I was actually feeling but I knew that somewhere in my chest something was doing a thing it hadn't done in a long time, something like the difference between a fist and an open hand.
"I'm not ruining it." She handed the notebook back without ceremony. "Your poetry is real. But it's lying about the ending. You can be broken and still not be finished, Vee. Those aren't the same thing." She paused. Looked at me sideways. "Also blue looks better than black on you. Just saying."
She went back to her book like she hadn't just walked into my chest cavity and rearranged things.
I held the notebook in both hands on the walk home. I didn't put it in my bag. I just carried it, which I have never done because I never wanted anyone to see it and ask what it was. I didn't care. Not today. I just walked.
The blue ink was still wet on the corner of the page. I kept not closing it all the way, scared to smear it, which is — I know how that sounds. I know.
I got home and I didn't go to the desk.
I went to the kitchen and made chai. Real chai, not the burnt kind I make when I'm not paying attention. I stood at the stove and actually watched it. I added cardamom. I don't know why I added cardamom. My hands just did it.
I sat by the closed window with the notebook open on the table in front of me, the blue ink drying in the afternoon grey, and I thought: she didn't fix my poem. She fixed the part where the poem gave up. There is a difference. I'm not sure I knew there was a difference until about forty minutes ago.
The pins and needles were everywhere now. Fingers. Wrists. Somewhere behind the sternum. I was waking up and it hurt in the specific way that things only hurt when they are still alive.
I drank the chai. It was good.
I didn't write anything.
Sometimes you just have to let a thing be wet before you decide what to do with it.
🥀
Mera siyah qalam sirf maut likhta tha, Usne neeli siyahi se mera naseeb badal diya. Maine kaha, 'Main andhera hoon, mujhe rehne do,' Usne kaha, 'Vee, maine har panne pe ek chiraag jala diya.'
— -
My black pen knew only how to write of endings, But with her blue ink, she rewrote my destiny. I said, 'I am the darkness, leave me be,' She said, 'Vee, I have lit a lamp on every single page.'
i don't really know what to say at the end of this one.
she edited my grief with a bank pen. she didn't even ask. and the worst part — the genuinely humiliating part — is that she was right. about all of it.
i keep looking at the word stopped. written in her handwriting in the margin of something i thought was finished.
maybe it wasn't finished. maybe i wasn't either. i don't know. i'm still figuring out if that's good news.
the chai was good though. that part i'm sure of.
(hmm so new chapter idk how much time and i already know it not going to be same as last time but i had forgot why i started posting in medium so i can't forget it.i hope u like it )
— Vee
Published by: editor keng