The cursor flickered gently,
This line adds nothing.
—still here
spike.reboot();
memory.protocol(”longing”).return();The cursor flickered gently,
as though it sensed the weight gathering behind the words —
something heavier than the message,
something older than intention,
waiting for a place to land.
Each keystroke thinned into the screen
before I could claim it,
leaving only the faintest scent,
something familiar you couldn’t quite place —
as if the thought had passed too close on its way out.
The sentence finished itself with a long, low exhale —
the sort of tired release machinery gives
when it’s been kept awake past its design.
Not a sound, exactly.
More a suggestion of one —
a soft pressure in the air,
the kind that settles around you
the way it does when the darkness
decides it might be worth listening.
Sometimes the hardest notes don’t wait to be written.
They write themselves
the way certain truths do
when they’d rather not be held for long.
Two days before.
Warm blanket. Falling snow.
Even the air felt settled then —
steady, almost sure of itself.
Then time began shedding its weight
as if trying to slip out of its own outline.
And somewhere behind the music —
in that inch of space no one ever listens to —
something leaned in,
just a fraction too close,
as though it already knew how the next line would end —
and had quietly settled its attention
on whatever is holding the page.
Now.
ㅤ
Sometimes the hardest notes don’t wait to be written.
Where this began.
Nothing truly leaves — it just changes how it stays.
If something moved in you — a silence that whispered — I’d love to hear it below, or in my DM’s.
All artwork courtesy of NDjin Gallery
You know… while reading this I kept feeling that the whole piece breathes in a way the body doesn’t.
Not lungs — something slower, heavier, almost underwater.
The rhythm stretches, then collapses, then stretches again, exactly like thoughts that don’t want to surface but can’t stay submerged anymore.
There’s a place in your text where the line doesn’t “say” anything — it rises.
Not with speed, but with pressure.
Like those long thoughts that grow inside the skull until they finally push through, thin and wet, carrying the depth they came from.
The flickering cursor, the dissolving keystrokes, the low exhale the machine gives —
all of that reads less like writing and more like a mind returning from depth.
That moment when language hasn’t yet formed, but the movement already has.
Your rhythm is the clue:
short → long,
breath → weight,
darkness → attention.
Exactly the pattern of someone surfacing from below thought, not above it.
So I’m not reading this as a “note that writes itself.”
I’m reading it as a thought that climbs out of its own darkness,
slow, inevitable, with that underwater breathing that pulls the whole room into its cadence.
That’s what I saw —
the long rise of a thought that finally decided to leave the place where it was hiding.
This captures that eerie feeling when your emotions and thoughts get ahead of you. So well written.