diary
Not because it is magic. I wish to be entirely unambiguous, in writing, for the record: I do not believe I drew a shape that reached into the fabric of reality and rearranged the conduct of my own thumb.
It worked because the act of drawing the wish obliged me to admit I harboured it, aloud, in ink, to a sheet of paper that would not glance politely away. ‘I want to stop checking where he is.’ You cannot un-know a thing once you have set it down in your own hand and watched it dry.
Most of the checking was never truly about him. It was about the intolerable ambiguity of not knowing, and the small, counterfeit relief of converting a wound into a task I could perform. A location dot is not information. It is a nervous system casting about for somewhere to put its hands.
The sigil offered the hands a better destination. It transmuted a compulsion into a rite, and a rite possesses an ending, a moment at which you set the pen down and it is finished, which is the one thing an anxious loop can never extend to you.
The paper did not flinch, did not judge, did not enquire why I still had the application installed. It merely held the sentence back up to me, plainly, in my own handwriting, until I grew embarrassed enough by the chasm between who I claimed to be and what I persisted in doing to actually close it. That was the entire medicine. The ritual was only an honest delivery system for a truth I already owned.
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