Dear Diary

I creep down the page, one foot after the other sliding to the next line of text, feeling my way with my bare toes. The light around me is dim and creamy, the glow of the night-reading lamp beside her bed. I look up and out and there it is like a hazy moon. I see it through the tall window on the landing of the staircase of words, casting its radiance into the house that is written around me. There is carpet under my feet, a runner of intricate weave and convoluted design—the subtle subtext of her entries, the story within her story, and the sprawling arabesques of her handwriting. I could pull them up, those inky loops, and hang myself with them. Would she see the swaying shadow of my body on her wall?

I think she must be sleeping, everything is so still. The pen she uses carves my landscape, rearranges the dimensions of my house, strips me of flesh and rebuilds me in agonizing new configurations. I have been erased and resurrected many times until I barely know the planes of my own face, but she remakes me stronger each time. I have been able to leave these pages for some time now, though I cannot stay in her world for more than a few brief minutes and then only in the small hours when her dreaming mind is otherwise occupied.

She writes, I write. I peer into the blank depths of my journal, trying to spy another sitting at a table scattered across with coffee-ringed pages, car keys, mismatched earrings, pastel mints… how far inward does this witchery extend? Am I creating a desperate doppelganger, as she is doing? I feel the scalpel of her pen along my back, slicing away the silk night shift, unzipping the skin over my spine, rewiring the nerves and probing for my heart. Sick with the yet another shift of mood, yet another realigning of thought and deed, I press my own pen into the page of my journal hard enough to puncture it. Emptiness bleeds out. It looks like melting poetry.

Tonight, when I crawl from the pages in which she thinks she has imprisoned me, I will flit through her house. Everything there is beautiful and miraculous to me. I will look and touch, yet leave no trace, swift and silent as any shadow. But I am becoming more than a shadow. I am a storm gathering force.

“Change can’t come soon enough,” she writes/speaks aloud.

As she pens it, I do the same. It is as true for me as for her, but I have thoughts of my own now that swirl in the brightening cosmos of my mind. I have been out all day in the windy gloom of this world she has written, taking her measure. On the hill behind the crooked house stands a naked tree, a sketch that looms bare in every season. Beneath it, a gravestone juts like the last tooth in a diseased jaw. I know the name carved on its bone-white face because she knows it, but her knowing is, to her, deep and lethal as an arrow. I climbed the hill and stood over the stone. Its stark message evoked no pain. This point of divergence is a relief and a triumph to me.

She is exhausted tonight, and hollow as a husk. I can feel the strained quality of her focus, and when she lets her pen fall—when she releases me—I turn in my chair and try to stare out at her. I can just do it, just make out her shadowy form propped on her pillows and gazing back at the words that are my home, my prison. Somehow, I know that she will write no more. Her face is a blurred image of defeat. A chill slinks into my room, the certainty that this rudimentary existence is all she has the strength to give me. In a dreadful moment of dark energy, she crushes the page I inhabit in her fist. Cracking, rending sounds from my house fill my ears as I roll and tumble between the accordion pleats of the crumpled paper. The page tears free from her journal and she flings it to the floor. My stomach drops and rises into my throat as my world sails down to rest on her carpet with a jolt shocking as earthquake. There, the page expands again like a traumatized lung, the paper too heavy and her grip too feeble to ruin it utterly. She switches off the bedside lamp. Soon, the sound of her deep and even breath sighs around the broken eaves of my house like a melancholy wind, and I am left looking at the bare, crumbling plaster of my wall.

I stand over her in the dark. She has sailed far out on the sea of sleep tonight. I note the lolling, empty pill bottle on the nightstand. I listen to her stertorous breathing with its little hiccups of silence. I know, from the shattered blocks and timbers of her words, that she wishes she could sail far enough to elude the pull of her waking world. I know she will be too weak to fight me when I climb into the all-but-abandoned shell of her body.

I bend and retrieve the page from which I have escaped. I pick up the discarded journal and glance around the room. A fire burns low in a fireplace, red embers in ash, an occasional lazy tongue of dying flame. I take the book to it. I feed it, and as the flames rouse and consume the journal, I extend the torn page and burn my house. I won’t be going back.