Diary’s Quiet Edges

She found the diary on her own.

Didn’t ask. Didn’t hesitate. Just opened it like it had been waiting for her.

I was in the kitchen, heating water I wouldn’t drink. She sat cross-legged on the floor, back against the wall, tracing her fingers over the rough spine of that brown notebook; its corners soft, its cover tired. A secondhand thing, like most things in this flat.

I didn’t stop her. Not because I trusted her, but because I had forgotten what I’d written.

The kettle clicked off. I didn’t move.

---

“Is this yours?” she asked.

I nodded, pouring water into a cup just to hear the sound.

She flipped to a random page. Read silently. Didn’t react. Then flipped again.

“Loneliness is a kind of dust. It gathers if you sit too long in one place.”

Noor didn’t say anything. She just looked around the room after reading it, like checking for proof.

The fan buzzed above us. My tea stayed untouched.

She leaned forward slightly, as if the words were pulling her in by the shirt collar.

---

She kept reading. Every few minutes, her brow tightened slightly, like she was hearing someone else breathe through the lines.

“The body learns to perform being alive. Shower. Email. Reply. Delete.”

“I laughed at a meme today and hated myself for it.”

“I once googled painless ways to disappear, then cleared history. As if shame still mattered.”

“The tap drips every six seconds. I timed it. It’s the closest thing to company.”

I sat down across from her. Not to interrupt. Just to exist beside her.

She turned a page, hesitated.

“There are no sharp objects in this flat anymore. Just rounded edges and a hope that it helps.”

She looked up. I avoided her eyes.

“I didn’t know it was that bad,” she said.

I shrugged. “It wasn’t always. It’s like mould. Starts where you can’t see.”

---

She didn’t speak for a while after that. The room breathed between us. I could hear her thumb brushing against the page edges, slow and deliberate.

Outside, the wind had picked up. One of the windows kept clicking slightly in its frame, like something trying to open but giving up.

She stopped on a half-written page; just one line in the centre:

“Today, I didn’t feel anything. Not even anything.”

She read it twice. Then again.

I reached for the cup. Drank water that had long since gone cold.

“I used to write at night,” I said. “When it was too quiet to ignore myself.”

She nodded, then added, “Some of these feel like letters.”

“They were.”

“To whom?”

“No one. But it felt easier to pretend someone might read them.”

---

Noor turned another page.

There were scribbles. Lines crossed out with enough pressure to leave marks on the next page. One section had just a date. No words. Then another page with only two lines, centre aligned.

“My mind hums like a refrigerator. Always on. Always tired.”

She laughed softly, not because it was funny but because she knew exactly what that sounded like.

---

Later, she asked, “Do you think writing helped?”

I considered lying.

Instead, I said, “It helped me not speak.”

“That sounds... worse.”

“It was what I could manage.”

---

At some point, the lights flickered. Rain started; not hard, but heavy. A thick kind of rain that stayed in the air, slow and certain. It made the window glass look bruised.

She got up and pulled a shawl over her shoulders. Didn’t ask for a blanket this time.

Then she sat by the bookshelf for a while, not reading anymore. Just holding the diary in her lap, closed.

“Is this still going on?” she asked, without looking at me.

“What?”

“This... whatever this was.”

“No,” I said. “Now it just echoes.”

A pause. Then she said, “Echoes are still sounds.”

---

Before leaving, she placed the diary back, the third book from the left, beside a novel with no title on its spine. She made sure the spine lined up with the rest. Pressed it in slightly so it wouldn’t lean.

She didn’t say goodbye. Just nodded once, gently.

After she left, I walked to the shelf and opened the diary, not to read. Not to reflect. Just so the pages wouldn’t stick to each other.

---

I sat with it for a while. Let the paper smell fill the room. Let silence sit beside me like an old friend who had finally learned to keep still.

The candle flickered near the window. The air was damp. The night didn’t feel dramatic. Just… long.

And the diary, once again, lay open.

Not as invitation.
As reminder.