Entry — After HER
Yes, it seemed at first like an easy exit, like slipping through Hawthorne’s grids—done, finished, escaped. But no. It was nothing simple. It was a surreal departure, an exit not from emptiness but from fullness.
Was she that fullness? Yes—she was. She carried within her a long-pressed longing, an invitation into her realm: a heaven woven from sensations, its walls breathing with tenderness, its drapes steeped in affection. For a moment, I believed in that sanctuary. But exits were inevitable. And so we had to leave.
To where? Toward the cold tribunal of Social Law—yes, that devastating architecture of formation, a law that builds only to unmake.
Anugami — Eight Years Later
I had not returned to Anugami in a decade. Today, when I touched it, the pages breathed like a long-closed chamber opening. Their thickness did not feel like paper but like strata of forgotten selves, each layer compressing the silence of years. The ink—stiff, patient—seemed to hum with a secret pulse, as if it had been waiting for my return, waiting to accuse me, or to forgive. The dry smell rose not as decay but as the perfume of something unfinished, still fermenting inside the dark vault of language.
And then, the voices: at first vague, disembodied, scattering like dust in a shaft of light. But I knew them. Did I? Yes, I did. They were mine, and yet not mine—fragments of me exiled into print, echoes no longer belonging to my throat. I had set them free long ago, but now they returned, not as memories but as estranged companions, demanding recognition.
"You left me," the book seemed to murmur. "You abandoned me to shelves, to silence, to readers who touched me but could not touch you. I carried you when you were weary of yourself, and still you forgot my breathing."
And I—what could I answer? I felt the ink alive again, not as language but as a slow animal crawling back into my veins. My hand trembled over the page, not in nostalgia but in the recognition of something uncanny: that I had once bled here, and that blood had fossilized into letters, waiting for me to confess to it.
"You are not finished," the book whispered. "You think you wrote me, but I am still writing you. Every time you touch me, I begin again. Every time you inhale my dust, I seed another version of your being. You cannot escape me, for I am your shadow in the form of paper. I am your unforgotten self."
And so I sat, flipping through the pages, feeling each word not as a sentence but as a wound, an incision through which I once entered myself. After all these years, Anugami was not past—it was present, alive, an unfinished scripture, still whispering, still feeding, still pursuing me in its silence.
But today, I have said—farewell to it.
Live long, my pages.
