Book One: The First Carving

You should not have opened this. You know that already, though curiosity blinds more than light ever could. This is not a novel. It is a body dressed in paper. It is not invention. It is record. I carved, I tasted, I swallowed, and then I wrote. Each line preserves what the knife first opened. Understand this: flesh does not endure. It spoils, it leaks, it sours into air. Memory does the same. Names collapse. Faces blur. Voices scatter until even grief cannot recall their timbre. I refused to lose what I had taken. Preservation demanded more than memory, more than ritual. It demanded transcription. That is why this exists. Not to entertain you. Not to comfort you. This is evidence. Every page holds the residue of what I carried home, what I cut, what I pressed into myself. I learned the law in the marrow: to know fully is to consume. To preserve is to devour. I obeyed the law, and the law left me with ink-stained hands. You will think this distances you. You will believe you are safe because you watch from the outside. You are wrong. Reading is its own act of hunger. Each word enters your eye, slides deeper, nests in thought, and reshapes your own voice. Do not mistake the silence of your mouth for safety. You are consuming, and what you consume reshapes you. The first carving was not clean. I shook. I tore where I meant to slice. The floor accepted what I could not hold. But even in failure, the rule held. Flesh became memory, memory became words, and words became this book. That is the chain you touch now. You hold more than paper. You hold the continuation of someone who should not continue at all. Do you want to know what it cost me? My hands do not feel clean, no matter how often I burn them in water. My tongue no longer trusts salt. I dream in fragments that do not belong to me. When I wake, I write them down, because to refuse is to lose them forever. I have become ledger and vault, nothing more. I live by transcription. I endure by feeding. And what will it cost you? Already, you feel the weight in your throat. Already you taste what is not yours. That is the toll. The book does not stay contained once opened. It leaves residue on the reader. Perhaps you will feel it first in your fingertips, a faint dampness that does not wash away. Perhaps it will come in speech, when words you never meant to repeat spill from you in my cadence. The cost is that you carry what I carried, even if you never touch the knife. I will not plead for forgiveness. I will not pretend you can stop. You are too far already. The only mercy is that you cannot return this wound. It is part of you now. And when you speak of it, when you hand it to another, you are not warning them. You are spreading it. That is how the record survives. This is the first carving. It is not the last. If you keep turning pages, you will know how deep it goes. If you close it, you will still carry the cut. Either way, you are marked. Now tell me, quietly, with no one listening—what part of you do you feel missing?