The air is lime-green silence,
a rectangle of grasslight humming behind my skull.
My neck is a question mark in red,
curved from too much listening to books
that never learned how to end.

I hold a folded piece of paper—
or is it a door,
or is it a very shy wing?
The thumb is yellow, as if it once was sun
and forgot to turn itself off.

“Lies doch,” the book whispers,
though nobody wrote the sentences yet.
I read the blank pages aloud anyway,
each silence pronounced carefully,
comma by comma,
ähm by ähm.

In this universe,
words are not printed,
they are inhaled.
You breathe in a chapter,
it travels through your two noses,
gets stuck in that pink labyrinth
between yesterday and maybe.

Page 1:
Every vowel is a small glass fish.
They swim in my eyes
and rearrange the reflections of the room.

Page 2:
Consonants are heavy,
like the necklace of stones on my throat—
each one a swallowed “no”
polished into maybe.

Page 3:
The margins are wider than the text,
so thoughts can pace up and down,
smoking invisible cigarettes,
complaining about the plot.

Sometimes the book shuts itself
like a tired eyelid.
Then I become the story.
Je deviens le roman,
chaptered in cheekbones,
footnoted in wrinkles of crayon.

My hair is a bundle of question marks
tied together with mustard light.
Every strand remembers
a different conversation that ended too early.
They meet in the bun at the back
and argue about what childhood really meant.

The green background is not background—
it is an audience,
a whole stadium of moss
watching me hesitate on the same sentence
for the fourth life in a row.

Here, gravity pulls sideways.
That is why my face is a collage
of detours and left turns.
In this library you never fall down,
you fall into,
into the spine of the book,
into the rim of your own iris,
into yesterday’s unspoken joke.

“Hör zu,” the necklace murmurs,
rattling softly like a pocket full of marbles.
“Today we read without meaning,
nur Rhythmus, nur Atem,
only the choreography of almost.”

So I begin:

Once upon a neck too long
there lived a reader with surplus ears.
She could hear the dust thinking,
the pigments gossiping about each other,
the silence rehearsing its lines
for the big performance at the end.

She read a story about a pig
that disguised itself as a human nose.
The disguise worked so well
that nobody questioned why everyone
smelled of childhood and wet earth
whenever they argued about politics.

The pig-nose learned to turn pages
with a tiny oink of concentration.
It underlined nothing
but remembered everything,
especially the parts the author forgot to write.

“C’est assez,” says the left eye,
“we have understood nothing,
which means we are finally close.”

“Noch nicht,” insists the right eye,
“another paragraph of confusion,
for balance, for symmetry,
for the golden spiral of doubt.”

So the reader tilts her head,
lets the story slide from horizontal to vertical,
lets verbs drip from the sentences
like paint from a tired brush.

In this moment,
the room rearranges itself.

Walls become bookmarks.
Time becomes a paperclip
that lost its job.
The future waits patiently
in the corner of the next page,
pretending to be a coffee stain.

I, the reader,
I, the crooked librarian of myself,
file these feelings
under “maybe relevant later.”
Zwischen Ablage P und Herz.

Outside, someone says her name,
but this is a place
where names arrive late.
They show up after you have left,
sit down where you were sitting,
and ask the empty air
what it has been reading lately.

I close the book that isn’t a book.
It folds like a bird
that has never seen the sky
but already knows how to migrate.

The green behind me
leans in a little closer,
checking if my pupils
have turned into full moons yet.

Not yet.
But they are rounding up.

Tomorrow, maybe,
when another picture opens its mouth,
I will remember this page of unprinted ink,
this necklace of almost-words,
this soft pig-nose compass
sniffing for the next sentence.

Until then I remain
the emerald reader,
half-question, half-snort,
bookmark tucked into my own throat,
waiting for the story
to start reading me back.