You Keep Reading Even When It Starts Lying

You don’t notice when the letter starts changing its mind. At first, it’s small. A sentence feels slightly off when you reread it, like it’s lost a word you’re certain was there before. You assume you misremembered. You’ve been doing that a lot lately. Memory is flexible. That’s what you tell yourself. The letter agrees. It tells you memory is a kindness. That it smooths things over. That it edits out sharp edges so you can keep functioning. You relax a little when you read that. You like explanations that forgive you before you ask. The letter uses you because it knows you won’t argue with that. Second person feels intimate, but not invasive—at least not yet. You read it like a mirror you can step away from whenever you want. You don’t step away. Somewhere in the middle, the tone shifts. Not abruptly. Gently. Like a voice lowering itself so only you can hear. The sentences get shorter. Less descriptive. More certain. It says you were present. You start to object. Present doesn’t mean responsible. Present doesn’t mean anything. But the letter doesn’t accuse you. It just lists details. Things you remember without remembering why. The way you learned to pause before responding.The way silence became your default answer.The way you watched situations resolve themselves without you in them. You feel the urge to justify yourself. The letter doesn’t give you space. It says the dead are very good at noticing patterns. That once movement stops, repetition becomes obvious. That when you’re no longer distracted by survival, you see how often the same choices get made. You don’t like being categorized. You skip a paragraph. The next one begins mid-thought, as if it noticed you leaving and hurried to keep up. It says you were never cruel. That would have been easier. Cruelty leaves evidence. What you did left impressions—soft, overlapping, deniable. The kind that fade unless someone presses on them. You feel something press now. The letter starts referring to moments you didn’t know mattered. Things you dismissed because nothing happened. A message you didn’t send. A look you didn’t return. A time you noticed someone unraveling and decided it wasn’t your place. You tell yourself you couldn’t have known. The letter asks why you keep using that phrase. You pause. That wasn’t written a second ago. You scroll up. The sentence is there, calm and patient, like it’s always been waiting. The letter begins to repeat itself. Not verbatim—structurally. You notice phrases echoing in different forms. You didn’t mean to. You didn’t know. You stayed quiet. Each one appears slightly altered, as if tested, refined. You wonder who it’s practicing on. There’s a section describing a death. It avoids specifics. No blood. No impact. Just a gradual narrowing. A life shrinking to the size of the space it’s allowed to occupy. You feel an odd detachment reading it, like the event happened far away, to someone you only partially recognize. Then the letter says something wrong. It says: You remember standing there after. You don’t. You’re sure of that. The certainty feels good—solid. You hold onto it. The letter doesn’t argue. It simply continues as if you had agreed. It talks about aftermath. About how things return to normal faster than expected. About how routines absorb absence. About how easy it is to step into the space left behind and call it coincidence. You feel watched—not from outside, but from inside your own thoughts. Like something is reviewing them as you have them. The letter starts using phrases you associate with yourself. Expressions you don’t remember teaching anyone. You assume it’s a coincidence until it does it again. And again. You check the end. You wish you hadn’t. The ending is… unfinished. It cuts off mid-sentence. No closure. No summary. Just a thought abandoned like it expects to be picked up later. By you. You scroll back to the middle. A paragraph you’re certain you skipped before is there now. It describes someone reading a letter and slowly realizing they’re being described more accurately than they’d like. You feel a chill at the precision. The timing is too exact. You start reading faster. The letter slows down. It says panic is inefficient. That denial lasts longer when it’s quiet. That most people don’t realize they’ve crossed a line because nothing marks the crossing. You feel like you’re approaching something. Or something is approaching you. The distinction matters less than it should. The final paragraph appears without warning. It says the letter doesn’t exist to accuse or absolve. It exists to continue. To hold the parts of you that were never examined. To keep asking the questions you avoided by surviving. It says the dead don’t haunt places. They haunt narratives. And you have been telling this one wrong. The last line blinks once before settling: You’re still reading because some part of you is waiting to be corrected. The cursor remains. The letter waits. So do you.

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