Final Draft

I rewrote the sentence on a Tuesday.

There was nothing peculiar about the hour, nor the weather, nor even the page that lay open before me—a page, it should be said, that I had not intended to revisit. It was merely a scrap from a half-forgotten story, a paragraph that had once held some sullen promise in the grey corridors of my ambition, and now lay among the others in that peculiar purgatory reserved for the nearly-written. I had opened the file not out of inspiration, but from the subtle, stubborn instinct to rearrange. It is a vice particular to writers: the belief that a thing might be made beautiful if only its arrangement were improved.

I had not written anything new in months. Or perhaps I had — scattered lines, aborted paragraphs, drafts that evaporated the moment they lost momentum — but nothing finished, nothing that endured. The pages I did return to felt less like work and more like evidence in a trial I hadn’t realized was underway. I was always either defending my worth or trying to revise the crime. Somewhere along the way, the joy had gone out of it. What remained was only the ache, and the habit.

The clause in question was harmless enough. His hands were cracked with cold. I stared at it for a time — long enough, I think, for the sentence to become unmoored from its meaning. The word “cracked” began to resemble the sound of a tooth splitting. “Cold” felt inadequate. What sort of cold? Was it the thin, bitter cold of city wind, or the deep and awful cold that inhabits the bones of widowers?

And anyway, why should it be cold at all? Why should the world ache just because it’s more believable that way? It was fiction, wasn’t it? I could make things soft. I could make things kind. Not every sentence needed to limp toward realism like a wounded dog.

In a moment that might have passed without memory on any other day, I changed it. I wrote: His hands were smooth and unmarred. I did not consider the implications of the change, nor did I expect anything from it.

When I looked down, idly, inattentively, as one looks at their own body while thinking of other things, I found that it was gone.

A scar had lived on the inside of my right thumb for as long as I could recall, though I do not believe I had ever recalled it with any great affection or interest. It was a crescent, no longer than the first segment of a fingernail, and the colour of softened chalk. I had, in my childhood, imagined it to resemble a comma, a comparison which once made my mother laugh, in that distant and peculiar way mothers laugh when their children make something literary of their wounds.

But there it wasn’t.

I brought my hand closer. Turned it over. Rubbed at the skin with the pad of my finger, as if the scar might reappear under friction, like breath on a windowpane. My skin was smooth. Whole. Empty.

I laughed, of course. There is always laughter in the earliest moments of madness. It is the instinct of a sane mind to explain away its own dissolving. But the laughter faltered. And then I cried. Not because what I had written had somehow come to life — no. That would have been triumph. But because I could not remember what I had cut myself on.

There was no accompanying image, no sting of accident or aftermath. No bleeding sink, no parental scolding, no smell of iodine. I had retained the idea of a scar, but not the event of it. The memory was clean, like something gently wiped away by an unseen hand.

The world had changed. And I, it seemed, had not been consulted.

⧫

It would have been easier, I think, to disregard it. Many things in this life are easier to forget than to understand. I could have dismissed it as a misremembrance, a lapse, an aging of the mind. But there is something inside writers, something ravenous, that cannot abide mystery without attempting authorship.

And so, I returned to the sentence. I changed it back. His hands were cracked with cold.

I saved the document. Waited. Stared.

Nothing.

I pressed the heel of my thumb against the rim of my coffee mug, hoping that some old ache would stir beneath the skin. But the scar did not return. The world had moved forward, and like a book revised too many times, the earlier draft had been thrown away.

⧫

I did not sleep that night, though I did lie in bed for several hours with the sort of stillness usually reserved for wax figures and guilty men. Sleep, when it did approach, came not with the mercy of forgetting but with dreams so bland I mistrusted them: a revolving chair, a book with no title, a corridor I did not recognize but could navigate with aching familiarity.

By morning, the world outside my window looked unchanged. The crows still perched like inkblots on the telephone wires, the sky remained smeared with that pale grey peculiar to cities that have forgotten how to host sunlight. It was all very ordinary. And yet, the scar was still gone.

It would have been unremarkable, had I not spent my entire life chronicling the precise texture of the unremarkable. Writers notice small things. We are trained to. A change in someone's gait, a lapse in their tone, the way the smell of rain alters when it's about to turn to sleet — these are the details with which we build character, the crumbs with which we lure emotion. So I noticed the absence of that scar in the same way a musician would notice a piano with one dead key. It wasn’t the note that struck me, it was the silence.

I returned to my desk.

I was certain I had changed the sentence back — His hands were cracked with cold — had watched the words reappear on the screen, even saved the file with a kind of petty defiance, as if to prove I was still the one in control.

But when I opened the document again, it was there: His hands were smooth and unmarred. The original revision. The one I had undone. It stared back at me with that eerie calm particular to inanimate things that refuse to behave.

Perhaps, I thought, the scar was a beginning. Perhaps there were other changes I might trace, if I dared to write them. And I did dare. Not out of bravery, but because the thought of a world so malleable, so foolishly susceptible to prose, was too tempting to leave untouched. I was curious. And if curiosity did not kill me, I suspect it merely wished to take its time.

I turned to a new sentence in the same neglected story, needing, more than I could admit, to be convinced. My hands shook as I made a second edit.

He had always been close with his father.

If this changed too, then it was real. Then I wasn’t mad. Then the page was no longer a page, it was a blade, or a god, or a mirror that could lie and still be true.

I remember thinking it harmless. I remember writing it almost absently, like one brushes lint from a coat sleeve. But I did not save the file. I simply sat with the sentence, letting its presence linger like perfume in a room one has just left. There was something vaguely profane about it, as though I had written a false memory and folded it like a letter inside my own biography.

My father and I had never been close. He had once described my work as "fluent but indulgent," which, for a man who paid compliments like postage stamps, was his way of issuing a mild indictment. We spoke rarely, but when we did, there was always a sense of formality, like we were speaking through glass. Still, I left the sentence where it was.

That night, I dreamed of a house I did not recognize. Not the one I grew up in, but similar. Familiar in proportion, alien in detail. A hall mirror that gleamed too brightly. A cup of tea on a windowsill, still warm.

When I awoke, I had forgotten what my father's voice sounded like.

Not entirely. There were traces. Intonations, perhaps, or gestures. But the full pitch of it, the weight of a particular silence before he spoke, the way he drew out a sigh before telling me I’d disappointed him, those were gone. Or rather, something else had replaced them.

In my inbox that morning was an email from him. A short note. Kindly worded.

Proud of you for sticking with it. Keep at it. Let me know if you need anything.

What had my father said before? What had I changed him from?

I strained to remember a version of him that existed before the line—He had always been close with his father—but no matter how I turned the memory in my mind, the contours slipped away. Like trying to trace the face of a man in a dream after waking. I could remember that there had been coldness. That it had defined something in me. But not what it sounded like. Not what it felt like. Just a blankness, wrapped in the shape of something I once feared.

⧫

I told myself I would stop.

But telling oneself anything means very little when memory itself is a draft.

It’s been some time now. I live in what I presume is still my apartment. The furniture is mine, or at least it agrees with me. I recognize the stains in the carpet, though I no longer recall their origins. I eat, I sleep, I write, though that last word feels increasingly untrue.

I have not dared to open the old files again.

What would be the point?

Each time I changed something, some line, some tiny clause, I hoped to trace its ripples backward. To confirm that something had shifted, that the past had been rewritten in the same shape as the sentence. But the trouble is: you cannot remember what was there before. Not fully. You suspect, you intuit, you mourn, but you cannot prove.

Even the mourning is uncertain. What I grieved, more than the memory itself, was the fact of having lost something and not knowing what it was. There is no worse kind of absence than the kind you have to convince yourself existed.

It became a cycle. I would change a line, then try to remember what stood in its place. I would sit at my desk for hours with that same dumbfounded look people wear when they return to a familiar street and find the building gone. No rubble. No wreckage. Just a different storefront, a different awning, and the faint certainty that something once meaningful stood there.

Eventually, the edits had stopped being experiments. They became habits.

I wrote that I had always been disciplined, and soon I found the dishes done, the bed made, the calendar filled with appointments I could not recall making.

I wrote that I was beloved in my field, and the invitations arrived, speaking engagements, interviews, congratulatory notes from names I had never dared to hope would read me.

And at last, when my madness, this cavity, had tunneled quietly through the core of me, I wrote that I was happy.

I phrased it carefully. He was happy, and always had been. There was no ache behind his days. Only light.

The effect was immediate. When I peered into the mirror, my own reflection softened, as if it too had grown weary of watching me suffer. The tension had bled from the brow, the mouth curved slightly upward, as if caught mid-laughter at a private, harmless joke. It was the face of someone who had never suffered.

But inside, God, inside was nothing. A sterile kind of joy. Polished. Painless. Hollow. There is a difference between forgetting pain and never having known it. The latter is not a gift. It is a vacancy.

It felt—truly—as though I had lobotomized myself. As if, with one line of text, I had reached into the soft tissue of my own mind and carved out every jagged, contradictory thing that had made me me. No sorrow, no guilt, no rage, no longing. All excised. Filed away. Sealed up in some unreachable cabinet. I could still move. I could smile, laugh even. I could say the right things in the right tone, nod at the appropriate beats.

If I wrote myself into success, had I ever struggled? If I wrote myself into love, did I deserve it? If I wrote myself into happiness, what right had I to mourn?

I became a ghost of my own authorship, wandering through a narrative I could no longer trust. And here, I suppose, is the moral, though I hesitate to call it that, as morals suggest clarity and stories like mine tend to rot at the edges. But if there’s anything I can say with conviction, it is this: There is a reason we do not edit the past. There is a reason the first draft matters. Not because it is perfect, but because it is earned. It contains the tremor of the hand, the misshapen thought, the wound before it closes. It contains you, as you were, not as you wish you’d been.

To rewrite is to forget that you once bled.

And once you forget you’ve bled, you cannot say for certain that you’re alive.

And the worst part? I had no desire to change it back. Because that part of me, the one who would have resisted, was gone. I had written him out of the narrative.

He was happy, and always had been. Which meant the one who suffered had never existed. And in his place, there stood only me, smiling like a man who’s forgotten how but does it anyway, because the script demands it. Because the line has already been written.

Because what kind of author rewrites the truth and then dares to mourn the fiction?

⧫

End of Draft.

(I think.)