The Nearest Anyone Has Come

Someone has been writing as me. Twice now. Signs it the way I sign it, when I sign it at all, which she has apparently studied closely enough to imitate correctly. I should be flattered. I am not going to pretend I know what I am, exactly, instead.

She got the shape right. The watching and not saying. The thirty years. The habit of deciding something and then declining to report the decision, which she wrote as though it were a discipline instead of what it actually is, which is exhaustion with good posture.

She got one thing wrong. She put a fire in it.

There was no fire. I am not going to say what there was instead — that has been the entire point of thirty years, and I am not undoing it because a forger needed a detail and reached for warmth instead of water, which is, I will admit, a reasonable guess. Most things people decide not to talk about did happen near a fire. Mine happened near the opposite of one. That is the only correction I intend to issue, and I am issuing it to a page no office will read, which is, I suppose, exactly her method too. We are not so different. I dislike that more than the forgery itself.

She signed it —P. I have decided, once, to sign the whole of it instead. Not because it matters. Because she didn’t.

—Promisa.