Traces

Ink bleeds backward through paper, leaving ghost-words on the page beneath— a secret conversation between surfaces.

What we write is never what remains. The pen moves forward, but each letter seeps downward, fragments into the white, a slow dissolution of certainty.

I think of fingerprints on frost, how the warmth of touching something dissolves the very proof we were there. The glass clears. The finger moves on.

Memory works this way too— not storing but staining, each recollection bleeding into the next, colors mixing where we thought we'd drawn distinct lines.

To remember is to blur. To blur is to forget. To forget is the only way to hold anything at all.