The Margins Hold Everything

A pencil's ghost lives in the spine, pressed by fingers that turned these pages decades ago, when the world was narrower, held entirely in the space between two hands.

Someone loved this sentence— I know because they folded the corner, a small insurrection against keeping things perfect, a mark that says: this matters, this stays with me.

The margins whisper with questions written in ink so faded it's almost prayer— Who was she? What did she hunger for? Her ghost reads over my shoulder now, two minds touching through the vellum, separated by years but not by silence.

I close the book slowly, cradling the weight of other lives, and understand: we are all just leaving traces in the margins of someone else's story.