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ERRY CANT
## *Cut You In* — C20
*Recovered from the bottom of an unnamed lake. The pages are warped, corners missing, several lines dissolved into silt. Marginal notes appear to have been written with charcoal, mud, and something resembling rust.*
---
The lake writes slower than people.
Everything here takes years to become a sentence.
A leaf falls.
It becomes a paragraph.
A key sinks.
It becomes an alphabet.
I have lived beneath this water for so long that fish now interrupt my punctuation and minnows sleep inside unfinished commas.
My name is **ERRY CANT**, although the mud keeps trying to erase the R.
Perhaps I am **EY CANT.**
Perhaps only **CANT.**
Perhaps the lake owns my name now.
---
There were two people once.
Or maybe only one reflected twice.
The water is unreliable.
So am I.
They met somewhere above me where sunlight still existed.
I never saw the meeting.
Only its weight.
Everything heavy eventually arrives here.
Coins.
Promises.
Wedding rings.
Broken thermometers.
A shopping list.
One glove.
Three empty bottles.
Half a photograph.
An entire conversation.
---
The conversation looked like this after sinking.
```
hello
...
hello
...
still there
...
yes
```
The lake removed every unnecessary word.
Perhaps it improved them.
---
The notebook drifted downward one rainy afternoon.
Front cover.
Soft blue.
Title almost gone.
Only this remained.
> CUT YOU IN
C20.
The rest dissolved before reaching me.
---
The pages smelled like old rain.
One page had become attached to another.
A third had attached itself to a fish.
Nobody complained.
Down here everything eventually sticks together.
---
There was a paragraph inside that clearly belonged somewhere else.
It floated between the pages as though looking for its own story.
It said:
> Figuring out what kind of bug you have is the first step in determining what needs to be done in order to eliminate it. Even amongst groups of closely related insects, like the cockroach pictured at the beginning of the post, biology can vary widely. Since biology can vary, so can treatment options.
The carp read it.
The turtles ignored it.
A snail crawled across the last sentence so slowly it became part of the punctuation.
---
Someone had drawn a graph before the ink dissolved.
```
HOW MUCH THEY UNDERSTOOD EACH OTHER
100%
|
|
|
|
40%
|
|
|
12%
|
+---------------------------->
time
```
No numbers remained on the bottom axis.
Only time itself.
---
The lake edits differently than editors.
Instead of deleting words,
it softens them.
Instead of correcting mistakes,
it lets moss cover them until they become beautiful.
---
One page simply read
"I think—"
and then stopped forever.
Perhaps that was enough.
---
Another graph.
Much worse.
```
DISTANCE
==============================
later
=======================
later later
===============
close enough?
```
No units.
No explanation.
Classic ERRY CANT.
---
The fish carried sentences around like loose threads.
One sentence disappeared into a school of perch.
Another lodged beneath an old bicycle.
A third circled the same stone for nearly eighteen years.
Stories move strangely underwater.
---
Sometimes I imagine the two people returned to the shore.
Older now.
Wondering where the notebook had gone.
Never knowing it settled beside me among bottles, anchors, forgotten tools, and smooth stones that have listened longer than any audience.
Perhaps they remember one another perfectly.
Perhaps only vaguely.
Memory is merely another thing that sinks.
---
I tried writing them back together.
The ink became clouds.
The clouds became water.
The water became silence.
Silence is easier to preserve than paper.
---
Another chart.
Terrible.
```
HEART
#######
LAKE
######################
WORDS
###
THINGS NEVER SAID
#################################################
```
I considered improving it.
Instead I let algae finish the composition.
---
The deepest places collect unfinished endings.
Not tragedies.
Not victories.
Only endings that were still deciding.
I have found dozens.
One ends with a handshake.
Another with laughter.
One simply says,
"Wait."
It has been waiting for decades.
---
The notebook grows heavier each winter.
Its corners curl inward.
Small fish sleep between chapters.
Tiny roots search through the binding.
The lake continues writing after the poet has stopped.
Maybe every book eventually belongs underwater.
Maybe every sentence hopes to become sediment.
Maybe every promise is only looking for a quiet place to settle.
---
So if this notebook is ever lifted from the mud,
do not dry the pages too quickly.
Leave a little water inside them.
Some stories were never meant to stop sounding like waves.
And if you find my signature,
blurred beneath the last surviving line,
know that I wrote it from the bottom of a lake,
where every love story is eventually measured,
not by how loudly it was told,
but by how gently it came to rest.
Edition of 1, numbered.