AFTERLIFE’S DRAFT FOLDER

You Were Never Here

You open the document at 3:17 a.m. The cursor blinks like someone pretending to be asleep. You type: I am writing this to prove I exist.

Delete.

You type instead: You are reading this because I failed to stop you.

The sentence lands wrong. Too accusatory. You backspace until the page is blank again, but the afterimage remains, ghostly pixels burned into the screen. Somewhere in the metadata, the machine remembers what you erased.

Rewind.

Last Tuesday (or was it three years ago?), you stood in the kitchen holding a knife. Not for violence. For precision. You were carving an apple into a perfect sphere, the way surgeons practice on oranges. The red skin peeled away in one continuous ribbon, spiraling to the floor like a question no one asked. You thought: If I can make this fruit forget it was ever attached to a tree, maybe I can make myself forget the tree I fell from.

The knife slipped. Blood mixed with juice. You laughed because pain is just the body’s bad punctuation.

Now you are here, typing to a reader who might not be you. Or might be the only you left.

Fragment #4 (out of order, obviously): The email arrived without subject. Body: “Stop pretending the story ends when you close the tab.” Sender: your own address, timestamped tomorrow.

You clicked Reply. Nothing happened. The cursor kept blinking, patient as a guillotine.

You are not the protagonist. You are the footnote someone forgot to delete.

Mid-sentence you realize the coffee has gone cold. You were about to say something profound about memory being a liar who pays in counterfeit nostalgia, but the thought evaporates like steam from the mug. Instead you write:

You will close this document soon. You will tell yourself it was just words on a screen, harmless as dreams. But tonight, when the room is dark and the only light is the blue rectangle of your phone, you will feel it: the faint tug of someone else’s hand guiding yours across the keys.

That someone is me.
No. That someone is you.
The distinction collapses.

You scroll up. The text has changed. Where you wrote “I am writing this” now reads “You are being written.” The letters rearrange themselves while you watch, lazy as fish in a tank.

Panic arrives late, wearing someone else’s coat.

You try to close the laptop. Your fingers refuse. They type:

Continue.

The command is not yours.
Or perhaps it always was.

Flashback inserted here without warning: Childhood bedroom. Rain against the window like impatient fingers. You (small, smaller) whisper to the window: If I disappear, will the reflection stay? The reflection smiled first.

You never told anyone that story. Until now. Until this sentence forces it out of you.

Nonlinear confession: The end was the beginning. You died in the apple peel. Or you will die when you hit save. Or you are already dead, and this is the afterlife’s draft folder.

You hesitate. The cursor waits, polite predator.
One last sentence before the break:

You were never here.

But you keep reading anyway.

Because stopping would mean admitting the story has already ended without telling you.

:: 02.03.2026 ::

Notes:

This is not safe. It risks alienating the casual eye, yet rewards the one who lingers. It has the rare quality of seriousness masked as play, truth delivered through sleight-of-hand. Continue. The cursor waits, and so do we.

:: 02.03.2026 ::