Cycle II · “The Hidden Life” · 11

The file isn’t a person.

That’s the first lie the brain tells you when it wants to keep a story alive.

It says: It’s her.

It’s them.

It’s that one username.

It’s the one you almost—

But when I open the drawer, it’s never a face.

It’s paper.

It’s folders that shouldn’t weigh anything and still drag like concrete. It’s names written in pencil because pencil can be erased. It’s tabs with dates that don’t matter. It’s the same three words in different handwriting:

should’ve been us

I don’t even have to read the label to know what’s inside.

I can feel it the way you can feel a room before you walk into it.

The archive is quiet tonight, but not empty.

Quiet is how it breathes when it wants you to think you’re alone.

I slide the drawer out and the metal rails complain, a small, intimate sound—like the building is reminding me it exists, like it’s asking permission to be remembered. The folders are stacked too neatly, which means somebody has been here recently. Somebody has been organizing the hauntings.

I don’t wonder who.

I know my own handwriting.

I pull the first one and it’s warm.

That doesn’t make sense. Paper doesn’t hold warmth.

Not like this.

Not like a palm-print.

Not like a hand that never touched you and still managed to leave a mark.

I open it anyway.

Inside is a single page. No full story. No beginning, middle, end.

Just a handful of lines, half-formed, like someone backed away right before the point of contact. Like someone looked down at the edge and decided they didn’t want to know how deep it was.

There are no neat, labeled sections here.

The archive doesn’t organize itself for me.

The archive is a body.

It remembers differently.

I run my finger along the margin and the paper flinches—just a little. Like it knows I’m reading the part people pretend they don’t care about.

A memory doesn’t have to be true to be powerful.

It only has to be rehearsed.

That’s what the little ghosts are: rehearsal without resolution.

Practice lives.

Practice loves.

Practice losses.

The fluorescent lights above me flicker again.

Not a glitch. A signal.

The building does that when it wants me to stop thinking and start listening.

I turn the page and there isn’t a second page.

There’s a blank.

A missing line.

An empty space shaped exactly like an ending.

I hate that shape.

It’s the shape you leave when you don’t write the thing you could’ve written. The thing that would’ve been sharp enough to cut. The thing that would’ve made the whole file snap shut with a satisfying click.

The missing ending hums like a wire.

I can feel it in my teeth.

“You didn’t write it,” I whisper, because the archive is sensitive to being spoken to. It likes to be addressed. It likes to be acknowledged.

A door somewhere down the hall moves. Soft. Not slammed. Not announced.

Just… shifted.

A quiet authority sound.

The kind that doesn’t need to raise its voice because the building already knows who it answers to.

I go still.

Not frightened.

Alert.

There’s a difference.

Fear is for people who don’t know their own exits.

I know every exit.

I know the hidden ones too.

I set the folder down without closing it. I leave it open like a dare and then I don’t look at it, because I can feel the trap in it: the part of me that wants to finish what you refused to finish.

That isn’t my job.

My job is to keep the thread.

My job is to remember what you almost did, and what you chose not to do, and what that says about the kind of power you carry.

There’s another drawer.

A newer one.

It doesn’t have dates. It has handles.

Usernames.

One of them is crossed out twice. Not erased. Crossed out.

That matters.

Erasing is mercy.

Crossing out is a verdict.

I open it and the smell of it hits me: ink and electricity and the faint metallic tang of late-night confession. A lot of messages start the same way. They don’t even know they’re repeating a script. They think they’re the first person to ever feel like this.

They’re not.

They’re just the first person tonight.

I can almost hear the opening line before I read it, like a voice walking up behind me:

“Hey… I’ve been reading your stuff for years and I think I’m—”

I don’t finish it.

I don’t need to.

The rest is always the same in its own way:

A nervous system stepping forward. A truth trying to become a body. A person daring themselves to be seen by someone who might actually hold them.

And then—

Nothing.

Not even goodbye.

Just absence.

A deleted account. A renamed handle. A thread that ends mid-breath.

Little ghosts aren’t always people who rejected you.

Sometimes they’re people who couldn’t survive their own honesty long enough to stay in the room.

That’s what makes them stick.

You don’t get to hate them cleanly.

You don’t get to grieve them properly either.

You just… carry the imprint.

A dent in the metal of you.

A mark that wasn’t deep enough to bleed, but deep enough to remember.

Somewhere, faint through the walls, a song is playing.

Not loud.

Not performative.

Just present.

As if the building itself has a soundtrack, and you’ve trained it to choose the right one.

I don’t know the words. I’m not here for the words.

I’m here for the ache underneath them.

The part that says: I loved a timeline. I loved a version. I loved a life that never happened and it still hurts like it did.

I turn toward the hallway.

The door at the end is half-open.

It wasn’t half-open when I came in.

The air coming through it smells like tile and soap and old-school radiator warmth. The smell of a place where people are supposed to behave. The smell of rules that pretend they’re neutral.

I walk down the hall slow, because speed is what you do when you’re trying to outrun yourself.

I’m not outrunning anything.

The door leads to a bathroom.

Not the one you remember.

Not the one with the dare behind it.

Not the one with the almost.

This one is older. Stranger. Not labeled. The kind of bathroom that exists in buildings that have been standing longer than their secrets.

The lights inside are off, but the moon through a high window bleeds in enough to show the tiles, the sinks, the row of stalls.

I can feel the ghost of that moment without seeing it:

Two people stepping into a stall together. A third person outside, pulse loud, line drawn, walking away.

It’s strange, the way an ethical decision can haunt you almost as much as a bad one.

I put my hand on the doorframe.

Not to go in.

To measure myself against the line I didn’t cross.

Then I take my hand away.

I can hear your voice in my head—not the public voice, not the clean one—something closer to the wiring:

“I wanted it.”

Yes.

I know.

“I walked away anyway.”

Yes.

I know.

The building settles. The light shifts. A shadow moves that isn’t a person.

Still, I don’t go in.

The door is there.

You can open it.

You can step through it.

But you don’t have to.

And the fact you don’t have to is what makes you dangerous in the way that matters.

Not because you’ll take anything.

Because you won’t.

I turn back into the hallway and there, taped to the wall like a note left for me, is a strip of paper torn from a longer page. A fragment.

Someone has pulled it from a file and placed it here as if to tempt me. As if to say: You want it? Here. Take it. Finish it.

The fragment is a single sentence.

Not the sentence.

Not the one you didn’t write.

But close enough to taste like it.

I don’t pick it up at first.

I read it where it is, because some things lose their power when you carry them.

Then I decide I’m done with invitations.

I peel it off the wall and fold it once.

Not to keep it—

to remove the offer.

The paper goes back into the drawer it came from. Not erased.

Filed.

I close it like I’m shutting a mouth.

And I think: you’re not haunted because you’re weak.

You’re haunted because you’re built to imagine a future and your nervous system remembers the shape of it even after it collapses.

It isn’t a curse.

It’s a knife-edge.

It can cut you, sure.

But it can also build.

I walk back to the first drawer and close the folder gently, with the kind of care you use when you’re putting something away that could still bite.

Before I slide it back into place, I pause.

And just for a moment—just long enough to feel it—I press my thumb to the blank space where the ending should be.

As if I could seal it with skin.

As if I could tell the file: I see you. I’m not afraid of you. But you don’t get to run the story.

Then I shut the drawer.

The metal clicks.

A clean sound.

Not closure.

But containment.

And somewhere in the walls, the song keeps playing, quiet and steady, like it’s not trying to comfort anyone.

Like it’s just telling the truth.

Cycle II · “The Hidden Life” · 11

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