I found it where they always put the things
they do not want you finding: second shelf,
behind a commentary on the things
of somewhere no one visits. By itself

the text was nothing. Faded ink, a hand
that shook toward the margins, one diagram
of something I half-recognised. The bland
institutional dust of what I am

supposed to leave alone. I left it open.
I came back after hours when the light
was mine and the silence was unbroken
and I could read without performing right.

The beautiful part is not the secret kept.
The beautiful part is how the pages know
exactly who will come. The shelf has slept
for years and years and still the dust falls slow

in just the pattern that a hand would leave.
My hand. As though the book had learned my shape
before I learned its name. I half-believe
the lock was cut before I found the drape

pulled back, the glass ajar, the chair still warm.
Someone was here. Someone is always here.
The text assumes a reader. That's the form.
A whisper in a room designed for fear

of whispers. I am not the first to sit
and trace the diagram by candlelight
and feel the clean particular hit
of knowing something true and feeling right

about the wrongness of it. Solitude
is not the cost. The cost is finding out
that solitude was always in the blood,
that long before the book there was the doubt,

the preference for the locked room and the late
hour and the question nobody had asked.
The book did not create the thing I hate
about myself. It found me. Unmasked

is too dramatic. Say it volunteered
a mirror and I looked. The loneliness
was already the shape of what appeared.
I was the gap the text was built to dress.

I closed it. I came back. I closed it. I
came back. The only honest thing to say
is that the closing was the louder lie.
The book is patient. I am on my way.

Penned by my hand on the 6th of Lupar, in the year 1002 AF.