Chapter One: The Page That Must Not Be Read
This is not the beginning of the story.
But it's the ending that allowed me to begin.
I wrote it, then tore it apart.
Wrote it again, tore it again.
Each time I thought I was destroying the story—
It was the story destroying me.
The page is still on the table.
Folded, as if ashamed of itself.
But I know one thing for sure: I never wrote this sentence—
> "Don't write me. I will write you."
Yet there it is.
In handwriting that looks like mine, but written in a voice I don't recognize.
Dark humor? A mental slip?
Is this me playing tricks on myself, or the story playing tricks on me?
I'm not crazy.
Or maybe I am.
Or maybe everyone is—except this story.
The problem isn't madness.
The problem is... this novel has started to remember me.
It knows things I've never told anyone.
Not my mother.
Not my dead friend.
Not even myself.
Page thirteen said:
> "You killed Ryan."
That's a lie.
Or so memory told me.
But the novel doesn't lie.
---
At exactly 3:00 AM, I woke up.
As if someone had whispered me awake without sound.
Same room. Same peeling wall.
Same broken clock that had stopped a week ago at 2:50.
But now—it was ticking.
It read 3:13.
Same number.
Same page.
Same sentence I never wrote.
It felt like time was copying itself.
Everything happening again—
But in a different order.
I walked into the living room, carrying my fear like a bomb without a fuse.
I sat in front of the folded page. I didn't touch it.
But it was already open.
And underneath, a new line had been written:
> "What you did in the basement will be written—whether you want it or not."
---
I haven't been in the basement for a month.
Nothing happened there.
Except that night.
The night Ryan died.
---
Ryan wasn't just a friend.
He was a part of me.
But you won't find him in any photo.
He only existed in moments of distortion—
Moments where I almost did the unforgivable.
And he was the only one who had the basement key.
We used to write together.
One novel.
We started it when we were sixteen.
We believed that stories could make us immortal.
That a single forgotten line could carve our names into history.
But something happened.
Something tore the story apart before it was ever printed.
And something tore Ryan apart, too.
---
The police said it was suicide.
I told them I wasn't there.
Now the novel says:
> "Don't lie."
---
Sometimes, you look into the mirror and don't see yourself.
You see something that knows you better than you ever dared to know yourself.
Something with no face—
But it knows your mother's voice.
Your full name.
How many times you wrote "I'm fine" while bleeding inside.
It knows the exact day you tried to erase yourself—not with a rope or blade, but with a sentence you couldn't finish.
That thing wrote my novel.
That thing is my novel.
---
I thought I was the writer.
But now the paper is writing me.
The pages move forward even when I don't touch the pen.
Every morning, I find a new sentence waiting.
Today, it wrote:
> "On page 57, you'll learn why Ryan never existed in the first place."
Was he an illusion?
Did my mind create him to share the guilt?
Did I write a person just to be free from myself?
Or has the novel begun rewriting
my reality?
---
This is no ordinary book.
It's a story that rewrites itself.
And rewrites me along with it.
And I'm terrified of the next page.