6th April, 2025
Plumes of smoke, bathed the blue of her eyes by fast-fading daylight, coil and contract like beckoning fingers from stacks of paper arranged in semi-circles on the floor. The curtains flash white; the desk turns slowly black. As the air begins to warm and circulate, a loose sheet flutters like an autumn leaf to the ground, where for a few moments it glows like a happy cheek on a warm day.
Then the heat sets in. Slowly, like panic rippling through a distant crowd, the paper crackles and chars. All too soon, it has curled into itself like a stricken animal, and its tear-stained scribbles are lost forever.
There are plenty of other sheets in the room. In total, he has filled four hundred and twenty-two thousand, some with just two words and others with novels written in a slanted script so tiny that they are impossible to read without the aid of a magnifying glass. Most were written by hand, though the last tenth, owing to the arthritis in his right forefinger, were completed on a type writer. These earlier notes were organised meticulously, with folders for each of his subject’s most notable physical features - her lips alone took up more than a quarter of all the pages he ever wrote - as well as all the dates they’d ever been on and far more than every dream they’d ever shared. The structure of these folders may be indecipherable to the outside observer - with labels like Opal Hair, Lake, or Sadness, none of which mean what one might naturally think - but they form - or rather, they formed - a perfectly navigable map in his mind, with indexes and cross-references and thick plastic reference tabs, the latter of which lend his bedroom an acrid, fishy smell as they burn.
He burns, too. He’s not around to feel it, of course, slumped as he is like a crashed-out junkie over his desk, one hand resting against a horizontal candle and the other clasped against his chest, but he would not regret this end if he were. In fact, it would seem rather fitting to die - to truly die, that is, in the sense that no trace remains - surrounded by the remnants of the woman to whose memory the latter four fifths of his life was dedicated. In several of his early pages, he prayed openly for such an end.