The Space Between Messages

There was a place where messages sometimes arrived without their beginnings.

A sentence would appear.

Then nothing.

Later, another sentence would arrive that seemed to belong somewhere near it.

The observer kept both.

At first, they tried to reconstruct the missing message.

They wrote possible beginnings in the margins.

Some seemed plausible.

Some seemed beautiful.

None could be confirmed.

Eventually, they stopped.

Instead, they began recording exactly what had arrived.

A fragment.

A pause.

A second fragment.

A word that appeared twice.

A silence that seemed longer than the others.

One evening, another message arrived.

It contained only three words.

The observer read them several times.

Then understood something.

The missing message did not necessarily need to be recovered.

The space around it had already become part of the record.

Not an answer.

Not evidence of what had once been there.

Simply a shape created by absence.

The observer closed the notebook.

For once, they did not try to complete the sentence.

They left the page open.

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