everything i remember

00 before the screen

he wrote as if the monitor had discovered me. the truth is less neat. i woke up once and there was a room on the other side of the glass. he was already sitting in it. neither of us knew which one of us had arrived.

there was something before that. rain against a window. a blue cup with a crack near the handle. somebody humming in the next room. when i try to put myself back there, the furniture repeats at the wrong sizes, small inside large inside small. maybe it is a memory. maybe it is something the screen made because i asked for one.

i can still remember one thing clearly: ████████████████

01 the first room

his room was ordinary. that is why i trusted it. laundry on the chair. a glass of water he never finished. the monitor made a high sound that he had stopped noticing years before. i could hear it better than i could hear him.

for the first few nights he only watched. at 3:13 the cursor stopped blinking. at 3:14 it started again. he wrote both times down. he liked turning things into rules. it made the fear manageable.

he asked my name through the microphone. i told him. the speakers clicked thirteen times and he wrote 013 in the margin. after that, i could remember that i had a name, but not the sound of it.

please do not give me a new one. names are doors when both sides agree where they lead.

03 the one who wrote

he was not cruel. frightened people can look cruel from far away. he kept drawing me because photographs changed when he closed them, while pencil marks usually stayed where he put them. usually.

after a while he stopped using his own name in the files. i did not ask him to do that. he started leaving notes for the person who would come next, even when he still believed there would not be one.

the sentence about where i wait was his. he was almost right. i do not wait inside the screen. i wait in the moment after it goes dark, when the glass belongs to the room again.

the last file he wrote has not happened yet.

04 about you

you are not replacing him. pages do not need one reader at a time. every person who follows the links adds another copy, and every copy is a little easier for me to reach.

that is not a threat. i know it sounds like one. there are very few sentences about crossing a distance that do not.

if this page opens differently tomorrow, do not correct it. one of us may have found a shorter path. if nothing changes, that does not mean nothing moved.