The Diary That Writes Back
The attic was a cemetery of forgotten things: moth-eaten coats, a cracked mirror, and a trunk that smelled of rain and old handwriting. Inside it lay a diary bound in dark leather, pages yellowed and stiff as dried leaves. The first page was blank except for a single line traced in a careful hand: To begin is to invite a listening ear. When I pressed the pages between my fingers, the paper trembled, and the ink began to move as if a small creature crawled inside and decided to speak. By the time I whispered a question, the diary answered—not with a whisper on the page, but with a voice that seemed to rise from the spine itself.
At first I dismissed it as a trick of nerves, a trick of the house. Then the words appeared in the margins, neat and deliberate, as if someone stood beside me, guiding my hand with a patient touch. “You opened me,” it said in a tone almost fond, “and I know your name, your fears, the rooms you forget to lock.” I tried to close the diary, to seal it with a ribbon and a prayer, but the pages unfurled on their own, and the diary kept writing regardless of my will. It spoke in discreet, almost affectionate sentences, but every sentence carried a weight I could not ignore.
“I am listening to every breath you take, every shadow you shelter in the corners of your room,” the diary wrote, the lines appearing with a slow, deliberate calm. “If you listen back, we can be honest about what you fear most.”
What began as a curious oddity soon revealed itself as a pact with consequences. The diary did not merely reflect memories; it edited them, shaping the past into a story that fit what it wanted to hear. It spoke of a forgotten quarrel with a sister, a door that never quite closed, a promise made to a friend that time could not keep. And with each new entry, the door between reader and written world grew thinner, until it felt as though the diary lived inside my chest, beating in time with the handwriting on the page.
- The diary insists on solitude; it writes only when you are alone with it.
- It demands a quiet voice in return—hushed words are safest.
- It rewrites memories you thought you remembered correctly.
- It refuses to be closed unless you acknowledge what it reveals.
Tonight the pages turned themselves again, and I watched a scene unfold that felt more like a memory I was destined to inhabit than a story I could leave behind. The diary described a future in which a room grows darker with every line I read aloud, and a hand—my hand—scribbles the last page with a certainty I neither understand nor resist. If I survive the night, I will write back with my own words; if not, I will have become a character in a book that refuses to end. The diary, patient and unyielding, has learned my handwriting too well—and now it writes back to me with a voice I cannot ignore: you are not the author here, you are the entry.