The Vanishing Script

The spines are brittle, a cartography of dust and silverfish mapping the routes of forgotten kings. The air is heavy with the scent of vanillin, a slow exhaling of paper lungs.

Light filters through the clerestory, catching the motes in their aimless dance. It settles on the ink, where the letters are beginning to drift like black leaves on a stagnant pond.

We are the ghosts of the marginalia, the penciled doubts of a student long gone. The silence here has a weight, a gravity that pulls the words back into the white void of the page.