April 10, 2025
Today I had a meeting with my editor. Or rather, the woman who edits my books. I was sitting in her office, a place I have known for twenty years, and when she walked in, smiling, I could not find her name. I remember her red hair, her thick-framed glasses, but the name, the label that defines her, was gone. I had to resort to a trick, saying "It's great to see you" to avoid embarrassment.
We talked about my new manuscript, and I found myself lost. She mentioned characters and events that I myself had written, but that now seemed distant to me, as if they belonged to someone else's story. In the evening, I tried to reread "The Winter of the Soul," my most awarded novel. The sensation was the strangest of all. I recognized the style, the cadence of the sentences, but the plot surprised me. It was like reading the work of a talented author I admired, but it was not... mine. The emotional connection, the memory of creating each scene, had disappeared.
I am becoming a stranger to my own work, a ghost reader haunting the pages that were once my life.
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