Palimpsest

Words fade to ghosts beneath the second layer, ink bleeding through decades like tea through linen, the original sentence lost to legible erasure— margin notes in hands we'll never recognize.

What was written first? No way to know. The pages curl like aging skin, brown-spotted, brittle where light wore them thin for months stacked by a window.

The new text runs perpendicular, unaware of the strata underneath, pressing its own urgency down through the fibers, into the ghost-print of someone else's confession.

We are always writing over what was. The past bleeds through but refuses to be read completely— a shadow that keeps its secrets, even in the light.