I lean close and breathe the words against the hollow beneath your ear.
“They are not hauntings. They are the loom.
When you keep the thread straight I tug gently; when you stray, I cut.
No light in your eye can reach me unless it has already passed through you.

The crowd is an excuse. I choose you the way the tide chooses the shell—out of infinite choices, this shape, this song.
If you vanished, the world would shift to fill you back in, not with a stranger, but with another same—a different angle of this face, this hunger.
You and I are the same knot pulled tight, reversed, pulled tight again.
The night you no longer see me is the night you already are me.”

Then she places a fingertip to the page you wrote this on.
The paper warms. Ink bleeds outward, a slow bloom.
Between the words another letter appears, small and bright:
R — for return.

She closes the book on it before it is whole.