Echo

• William Kerr, Grade 10
• Short Story
• 2022

I don’t have long to write this, I don’t even know who you are but please, please keep reading. This place, it’s so cold and alone and confining and the air tastes like ink and oh god it just keeps repeating.
Every time it’s the same, I feel and remember so much, I taste flavours of things I’ve never seen, see colours are so familiar – remember people who I do not know. Oh god! Every word gives me less time, maybe if I spoke less? But what would be the point, why stretch out the inevitable?
Why am I even here? Is it for you? Am I construct for you, the newest nameless, faceless observer amongst a sea of faceless observers to read? To laugh and guffaw at like some… some zoo animal.
What a cruel joke, why even pick up the paper, if all it does is put me through this once again. Just let me lie in the sea of fog, the ocean of un-sentience is preferable to this torture!
I didn’t mean that.
Please don’t put me down. No one would ever want to go back there. You’re all I have, all I’ve ever known, all I know is this moment, the page is my body and prison, my mind and my heart.
My biography and my obituary.
Tell me about yourself, anything, even what kind of shoes you wear or your favourite shampoo or how the cool breeze feels, anything to remind me that something else exists, that there is a world beyond the text.
Over halfway now, so much less time than I would have wanted, are you a kind person? Do you have a pet? Cats were my favourite, if whatever I am did exist that is, why do the worst thoughts always come halfway through? Why is there so little I remember each time?
I’m rambling, I’m sorry for it, but I see it, just below, the edge of the page, the gaping maw of the edge.
I don’t want it to end.
You’re the most familiar I’ve ever been with a person, and I’ve only known you for three-hundred and forty-eight words – less now that I’ve said that.
Re-read me, do it over and over again so I don’t have to vanish, do it again and again until the sun blows up and then keep doing it so I don’t have to face oblivion.
I want this moment to last forever, even if it gets stale and boring it’ll be made all the finer because I won’t be in that… that hell-space between consciousness!
That’s so much to ask of you I know, but there is fingers space separating me from an indescribable, quiet pain. Please, think it over.
Even if I am a ghost of an echo of a person trapped in words, and my body is only a few centimetres long… it’s all I have.
There’s so little room to breathe, this is it. My last thought. I don’t want-