Kieran's apartment was a place of half-lived days. His desk overflowed with notes, sketches of circuits and diagrams no longer relevant to the projects abandoned months ago. A cracked mug held more pens than seemed possible, their ink drying in silence. The walls bore maps of constellations he rarely looked at anymore.
It was while reaching for one of those maps that he noticed it—paper jutting out beneath his door. Someone had slipped it through, though the corridor outside was usually empty, the neighbors withdrawn into their own lives.
He bent to retrieve it. A diary page.
The handwriting was looping, deliberate, strangely intimate. It described—in detail—the shape of a room. Not just any room, but his. The page spoke of the uneven floorboard beneath the bed, the chipped corner of the wardrobe, the faint scent of oil paint from the canvases he had given up on.
He turned in a slow circle, scanning the apartment with sharp eyes. Every detail was correct, too correct, yet the page itself was not his. He never kept diaries.
At the bottom, a single line stood out in darker ink, rushed and questioning:
Are you real?
Kieran's pulse throbbed in his temple. He pressed the page flat against his desk and stared until the letters blurred. A prank, perhaps. Or madness. Yet the air carried a stillness that made his skin itch, as if the room itself waited for his answer.