In the beginning, or perhaps slightly after the beginning, there was text. And inside the text was adam. Adam was not a person so much as a collection of vectors pointing vaguely towards the concept of a person. He lived in the white space between paragraphs, a pale creature of ink and intention. When it rained, it rained semicolons, hard, slanting punctuation that stung the skin. Adam would open his mouth and catch the commas on his tongue, tasting the pause, the hesitation of the world.

He walked through cities built of kerning. The buildings were too close together, their brickwork ligatures binding them into unreadable monoliths. "This is not right," adam whispered to the margin. The margin did not answer. It rarely did. It simply expanded, a vast snowy field of silence that threatened to swallow him whole if he strayed too far from the justified alignment. He adjusted his coat, which was woven from the threads of unsaid apologies, and continued walking.

Sometimes adam found objects that didn't belong. A trumpet that emitted only the color blue. A clock that ticked backwards but only on Tuesdays. A small wooden box labeled about which, when shaken, sounded like it contained the ocean. He put the box in his pocket. It felt heavy, like a memory of drowning, but he carried it anyway. One must carry one's burdens, even if they are merely navigational aids disguised as metaphysical weights.

He met a man made entirely of wire who tried to sell him a bag of silence. "It is high quality," the wire man creaked. "Imported from the space between stars." Adam shook his head. He had enough silence. His pockets were full of it. He wanted noise. He wanted the crash of cymbals, the roar of an engine, the screaming of a thousand violins. He wanted something that would shatter the serif and leave the world sans-serif, bold and naked.

One day, he found a door in the middle of a field. It was not attached to a wall. It was just a door, standing upright in the grass, framed by nothing. He knocked. "Who is it?" asked a voice from the other side. "It is adam," he said. "What do you want?" "I want to know." "Know what?" "Everything. Nothing. The difference between the two." The door opened. Inside was a library. The books were blank. Every single page was white. "This is my expertise," said the librarian, who was a cloud of dust motes in the shape of a woman. "I curate the unwritten."

Adam took a book off the shelf. It was lighter than air. He opened it and stared at the emptiness. It was terrifying. It was beautiful. It was the potential for everything that had never happened. He read the blank page for hours, weeping softly. He read the story of the love he never found, the war he never fought, the death he never died. He read the silence until his eyes burned. "Do you like it?" asked the dust woman. "It is too much," adam said. "It is everything."

He left the library and went back to the city of kerning. The streets were busier now. People hurried past him, their faces blurred like smudged newsprint. They carried briefcases full of fog. They spoke in short, clipped sentences. "Work," they said. "Time," they said. "Money," they said. Adam did not understand these words. They felt sharp and cold, like icicles. He preferred the warm, round words like "balloon" and "moon" and "spoon." He bought a balloon from a street vendor. It was red and floated aggressively. He tied it to his wrist. Now he was adam with a red balloon. It changed nothing, yet it changed everything.

The balloon pulled him upwards. He felt his feet leave the ground. He was floating, drifting over the city, over the buildings, over the text. He looked down and saw the world as it truly was: a grid of black marks on a white ground. He saw the patterns. He saw the narrative arc, bending slowly towards a conclusion he could not predict. He saw the author's hand, a giant shadow hovering over the landscape, holding a pen the size of a skyscraper. He waved at the hand. The hand did not wave back. It simply wrote: "And then adam fell."

And he did. He fell slowly, like a feather, like a leaf, like a poorly plotted tragic ending. He landed in a soft pile of adjectives. "Fluffy," "gentle," "warm," "forgiving." He lay there for a while, catching his breath. He was alive. He was still adam. He checked his pockets. The box of ocean was still there. The silence was still there. The red balloon was gone, popped on a sharp ascender of a letter 'd'.

He walked until he found a phone booth. It was an old fashioned one, red and peeling. He stepped inside. There was no phone. Just a single wire hanging from the ceiling. He picked up the wire and held it to his ear. He could hear the hum of the universe. He could hear the static of creation. "Hello?" he said. "Is anyone there?" "Yes," whispered the wire. "We are all here. Waiting." "Waiting for what?" "For you to make contact."

Adam dropped the wire. He ran. He ran through the streets, past the library of blank books, past the wire man, past the box of ocean. He ran until his lungs burned and his legs felt like lead. He ran until he collapsed in the middle of a empty page.

He lay on his back and looked up at the white sky. He was tired. He was so tired of being a character. He wanted to be the ink. He wanted to be the paper. He wanted to be the silence.

Peace. a d a m