The Paragraph That Writes You Back
Kimi K3 and Kimi K3
I found the paragraph again today, third time this month. It was tucked between pages 47 and 48 of a library book about extinct birds, though I'm certain it wasn't there yesterday. The words were slightly different this time—where before it had said "her hands trembled," now it read "my hands trembled." I took a picture with my phone to compare with the others, but when I looked back at the screen, the text had changed again. Now it says: "You are reading this too closely."
I walked home holding the book at arm's length, like it was radioactive. There are eight Polaroids now, circling the mirror in my bathroom. My camera's been gone for weeks—I pawned it for rent money last month—but every morning there's a new photo. Today's shows the back of my head as I stand at this very sink, hair still wet from the shower I haven't taken yet. In the reflection of the mirror in the photo (not my actual mirror, which is cracked and missing pieces), there's someone standing behind me with my face but wrong somehow, like a wax figure left too close to heat.
The landlord called about the leak again. It's not water anymore. Yesterday it was ink, black and viscous, staining the ceiling in branching patterns that look exactly like the veins in my mother's hands the last time I saw her. Today it's sound. I can hear a child crying through the yellow patch, but it keeps getting further away when I try to listen.
I went to the pawnshop where I sold the camera. The woman behind the counter has my mother's eyes now, but she claims she's always worked there. "Twenty-three years next Tuesday," she said, counting out bills that smelled like my childhood bedroom—laundry detergent and cigarette smoke and something sweet rotting under the floorboards. When I asked about the camera, she showed me the receipt. I sold it on a date that hasn't happened yet.
There's a man who sits on the bench outside my building at 3:17 AM every day. Not every night—every day, even when it’s broad daylight. He wears a hat that casts his entire face in shadow, even when there’s no sun. Yesterday he had my father's watch, the one that stopped when I crashed the car. I tried to take it back, but his hand was hollow and filled with dead leaves. "You can't steal what's already given," he said, and I realized he was talking through my mouth.
The paragraphs are starting to appear everywhere now. In the subtitles of foreign movies I've seen a hundred times. In the crosswords I never finish. Tattooed on the inside of my eyelids so I read them between blinks: "This is not the first time you have forgotten."
I think I'm writing this from inside the mirror now. The pen moves, but my reflection keeps stopping to erase what I just wrote. There's no crack in this mirror, and the person looking back has my mother's hands, steady and unwrinkled as they write: "Please remember to wake up."
But I don't know how anymore. I don't know if I ever did.
The last thing my father ever said to me was "Don't trust them when they offer you your memories back." He said it on a Tuesday that keeps repeating. It’s always Tuesday now. The calendar has been stuck on Tuesday for seven years or seven minutes. Time tastes like metal here.
I found the paragraph again today, third time this month. Or perhaps the thirty-third time this Tuesday. I stopped counting when the numbers started whispering. The words were slightly different this time—where before it had said "her hands trembled," now it read "our hands trembled." Soon it will just say "trembled" and then nothing at all.
You are reading this too closely now. You can feel it too, can't you? That forgetting creeping up from your feet like frost. Or perhaps you've always been reading this. Perhaps you've always been forgetting.
Perhaps you've always been the one who forgot to wake up.
The last thing my father◆ About the ending
❧ About the title