You stop reading the Gospel for a week.
You unplug everything. Hide every pen. You live in silence, mouth closed, hands idle.
But your books don't stay still.
At first, it's the margins.
Tiny, delicate scratches in your old notebooks. Phrases written in your own handwriting—only crooked, windblown, wrong.
"You left me in mid-sentence."
You burn them.
The ash arranges itself into footnotes.
You lock the drawers. But the walls begin to annotate themselves.
You paint over them.
New lines bleed through the coat:
"Your erasure is a revision. Not a release."
You begin to feel watched not by the words—but by the whitespace.
Empty space that waits to be filled.
Space that hums, eager.
The Gospel doesn't need your consent anymore.
It only needs...a surface.
APPENDIX LXXXVIII: THE FOOTNOTE THAT BREATHES
At first, it's a joke between scholars.
