I am not a character. I am not a city or a frequency or a cat. I bought the book at a shop. There was a table near the entrance. The book was on the table. I picked it up because the title had the word "leave" in it and I had recently been left and I was buying books the way some people buy groceries after a breakup — not because they are hungry but because the choosing feels like a decision and decisions feel like control.
I do not know which of Jade's forty-nine sentences was mine. I know one of them was.
I read it in two nights. The book was warm. I assumed this was the heating. I assumed this was the coffee. I assumed this was a coincidence.
Books are warm. I did not know this before. The paper has a temperature. The holding changes the temperature. The reading is the warming.
I did not understand the ending. The woman sits in a chair. The chair is warm. She recognises the temperature. I did not recognise the temperature. I went to sleep. The book was on the nightstand. In the morning it was still warm.
Then the letters arrived. The cat said: you are the wall now. The postcard writer said: the handwriting is yours. Jade opened her notebook and showed me the forgeries and I recognised them because I have been forging my own departure sentences since the breakup — cleaning the ragged thing he said into something that fits in a story I can tell at dinner.
I stopped naming. I stopped trying to identify the sentence. I held the book. The book was warm.
I am not a character. I did not consent to this. I bought a book at a shop and now my temperature has changed and the chair I am sitting in is warm and I do not know if the warmth is mine or the book's or the reader before me who sat in this chair and whose body is still in the fabric the way every body is still in every chair it has ever sat in.
Every reader has a chair. The chair is warm because the reader before you was sitting in it.
You are sitting in mine.
— A Reader
A city. A shop. The table near the entrance.