Chapter Seven: The Page Written Before I Was Born
Since last night, I've been trying not to look at it.
The new page.
It wasn't like the others.
Not from the same notebook.
Not the same kind of paper I'd been using since this whole nightmare began.
This one was old—
Yellowed.
Edges burnt, as if someone had pulled it from fire just before the flames devoured it whole.
And yet… it was written in my handwriting.
Or… a child's version of it.
The letters were large. Uneven. Trembling—
As if the hand that wrote them had never held a pen before.
At the top, it read:
> "You should never have been born."
That sentence…
I swear I've seen it before.
Not in a dream.
Not in a nightmare.
But in something older—
A place outside of time.
In one of my earliest notebooks, when I used to write stories to escape my reality, I had scribbled something close:
"I wish I wasn't here."
But never like this.
Not with that cruelty.
Not like a voice speaking to me—not from me.
Could it be…
That the novel started writing itself before I was even born?
Was I just a forgotten sentence in some ancient draft… brought back to life?
That night, I couldn't sleep—as usual.
But this time, it wasn't the silence that kept me awake.
It was the page.
It pulsed.
Yes.
I could feel it breathe.
Like it wasn't paper…
But torn flesh trying to speak.
Suddenly, a memory surfaced.
I remembered something about my birth.
A strange incident my mother had gone through—
And how the doctor had said:
> "It would've been better… if it hadn't survived."
But they weren't talking about her.
They were talking about me.
The novel… it knows more than it should.
It's beginning to remember things I was never conscious of.
I held the page with trembling hands, and just before I could burn it or tear it apart—
I noticed something.
At the bottom, written in faded red ink—
Almost unreadable:
> "On page 91… you will read your final message."
But the novel only has 74 pages so far.
So where did page 91 come from?
And who wrote that message?
Me?
Or him?
And then, a final question struck me—
One that made me drop the
page altogether:
If this was written before I was born...
then who was writing before me?