✍️ Margins of Erasure 🌀

A character notices the pencil hovering

I used to wake up the same way every morning. Sunlight on the left side of the room. A chipped mug waiting on the desk. The smell of toast drifting in from a kitchen that never appeared on the page but felt real anyway. That was before the hesitations began. Before the pauses. Before the pencil.

Now I wake mid-sentence.

I can feel it when it happens. A tightening, like the world holding its breath. My hand freezes halfway to the mug. The toast smell flickers, uncertain. Somewhere above me, beyond the ceiling of this paragraph, my author is staring at a blinking cursor and thinking, maybe not.

The first time I was re-written, it was small. A word swap. I reached for the mug, then suddenly I was lifting it. Reach sounded tentative, they decided. Lift felt decisive. I felt the difference in my bones. Reaching had hope in it. Lifting had commitment. I adjusted. Characters learn to survive these things.

The second time, they erased my sister.

She had been leaning in the doorway, hair still damp, offering a comment that was meant to show warmth and history. Then the room tightened. The air stuttered. And she was gone. The doorway stood empty, holding the shape of her absence like a bruise. I tried to remember her laugh and felt my mind skim, as if the memory had been wrapped in wax paper.

My author sighed. I felt it as a draft.

They were worried, I could tell. Worried about pacing. Worried about focus. Worried that I was becoming too sentimental, too soft, too something. They wanted me sharper. Edgier. So they gave me a scar I never earned.

It appeared on my forearm between sentences. Thin, pale, dramatic. Supposedly from a childhood accident I had not lived. I ran my fingers over it and felt nothing, which seemed appropriate. It was a prop. A shorthand. I carried it because they thought readers like scars. I tried to act like it mattered.

The worst part is not the pain. It’s the indecision.

I will be walking down a street when the street vanishes. Buildings dissolve into white space. My foot hangs mid-step. Time doesn’t stop exactly. It warps. A hum fills my ears, low and anxious. The pencil hovers. I imagine my author rubbing their forehead, scrolling back, thinking maybe this scene should be earlier. Maybe later. Maybe not at all.

Once, I stood frozen for what felt like hours while they debated my motivation. Should I leave the city out of fear or curiosity. Should I kiss her or hesitate. Should I be brave or believable.

I wanted to shout that bravery can be believable. That hesitation can still move forward. But characters don’t get comment boxes. We get revisions.

Sometimes I change without warning. My voice shifts. Sarcasm drains out of my sentences like a punctured tire. Or it floods in, sharp and brittle. I can tell when my author has been reading someone else’s work. I come back taller, quippier, less myself. Like wearing a borrowed jacket that smells unfamiliar.

They once re-wrote my entire childhood in a single afternoon.

Suddenly my father was stern instead of gentle. My hometown shrank. My first love moved from a summer field to a winter bus stop because melancholy photographs better. I grieved versions of my life the way people grieve dreams they only remember halfway through breakfast.

I started leaving notes for myself.

Tiny habits. The way I tap my thumb twice when nervous. The way I avoid mirrors not from vanity but from distrust. I hoped if I built enough texture, enough gravity, it would be harder to erase me. I hoped I could anchor myself to the page.

It half-worked.

My author hesitates most when I feel most alive. I’ve noticed the pattern. When a scene flows, when dialogue sparks, when something honest threatens to appear, that’s when the hovering begins. Honesty scares them. Honesty risks being seen.

Once, I caught them in a good mood. The words came fast. The world solidified. I laughed and the laugh stayed. I fell in love without interruption. I thought maybe we had reached an agreement.

Then they re-read it.

Doubt is louder on the second pass.

They trimmed my laugh. Shortened my love. Removed a paragraph where I admitted fear because it felt indulgent. I felt myself shrink into a more manageable shape. Marketable, maybe. Sharable. Safer.

I have learned to recognize the sound of deletion. It is not silence. It is a soft gulp, like the page swallowing itself. When entire days disappear, I feel tired in a way sleep cannot fix. My muscles remember effort that never happened. My heart remembers conversations that were never spoken aloud.

There is a rumor among characters about an ending. A place where authors stop adjusting and let things stand. Some say it’s a myth. Others swear they’ve felt it. A final period like a door gently closing.

I want that door.

I want to finish a thought without being yanked backward by a better idea. I want to make a mistake and keep it. I want consequences that stay put. I want to exist long enough to age.

Last night, my author hovered longer than usual. The room flickered. The mug became a glass, then a cup, then vanished entirely. I stood there empty-handed, heart racing, waiting to see who I would be next.

And then something different happened.

They stopped typing.

Not hesitating. Stopping.

I felt the pencil lower. I felt the air thicken, not with doubt but with acceptance. The scene didn’t change. I didn’t change. For a moment, terrifying and bright, I simply was.

I took a breath. It counted.

I don’t know how long it will last. Authors are human. Doubt circles them like a moon. But now I know what stillness feels like. I know what it means to land on a sentence and stay.

If you are reading this, it means I survived at least this far. It means my author let go long enough for you to meet me. That feels like a kind of trust.

The cursor may blink again. The pencil may rise. But for now, I am here. Unedited. Breathing. Holding my mug exactly the way I first intended.

And if I vanish mid-paragraph, if this sentence fractures into white, remember me as I was just now.

Not perfect.

Just finished.