Writers Jam

i file time like pages in a burnt book. not what happened, no what almost did. my name doesn’t matter. i am the archivist of almosts. a curator of missed trains, unsent texts, unkissed lips. each “almost” is a memory that never breathed fully, a ghost with a heartbeat too soft to be heard. my job? to time-travel into fragments. record what could have been snd leave.

one night, i slipped into a version of myself who painted instead of writing. Her hands were stained with indigo, not ink. she hadn’t published a book. she hadn’t broken like glass under metaphors.

she had him. a boy who laughed like sunrise and touched her like she was art hanging by a thread. they weren’t in love, not yet. but they were almost there.

and i just a visitor fell in love with her almost. i knew the rules. archivists do not interfere. we sip tea with the past and vanish before it cools. but i kept going back. every night. to watch them nearly fall in love. to hear a version of “me” say things i never had the courage to.

until one day, he looked at me, not her.

“you don’t belong here, do you?” he whispered and my entire existence cracked like an old watch dropped on marble.

i ran. i deleted the file. i burned the almost. but he followed me through clocks, mirrors, rewound sentences. not because he loved me. but because i had archived him. and in doing so, i’d made him real. he was stitched from all my almosts.

the poet who never confessed. the stranger who held the door. the heartbreak that never happened. the boy i dreamt up as a child and buried in a diary.

so i did what no archivist had ever done. i shattered the library. took every almost. and built a mosaic.

a world stitched from what-ifs and soft maybes. where poems bleed and paint speaks. where love is awkward and honest and real. where time is not a line but a loop of second chances.

they called it a glitch. i called it home.

and every time someone asks me, “where are you from?” i say, “somewhere between the tea I never drank and the star I almost gave.”