I thought maybe if I deleted his words, I could delete him.
It was almost funny, how desperate I'd become, sitting at my desk at 3 a.m., fingers trembling over the keyboard, highlighting every sentence that didn't sound like me. Delete. Delete. Delete. Each click felt like a small exorcism.
But the moment I blinked, they came back.Not just reappearing, rewritten. Sharper. Cleaner. Crueler.
The sentences I'd erased now stared back at me, rewritten in my own tone. Except they weren't quite mine. They knew too much. They used details only he would know.
"You told them he was driving."
"You didn't cry when they pulled her out."
"You watched the flames before you screamed."
I tried again. Backspace. Save. Close file. Unplug the laptop.When I opened it the next morning, the deleted paragraphs were back, only now, they were signed.
K.O.
My chest felt hollow, like something had been scooped out of me. I typed, "You're not real."
The cursor blinked twice, then answered:
"Neither are you."
I don't know how long I stared at that line. My reflection on the dark screen looked foreign, eyes sunken, lips cracked, hair wild. When I reached to touch the glass, my reflection reached first.
The longer I stared, the more it felt like the laptop wasn't a machine anymore. It was a mirror. A mirror made of words, rewriting me from the inside out.
Each correction he made sounded truer than my own memories. Maybe he wasn't overwriting them. Maybe he was restoring them.
And that terrified me more than anything.
Because what if the lies I've been telling all this time weren't to the world,but to myself?