The Page Left Open

Nyra came to a page near the middle of the book and stopped. The rows above it were full, season after season pressed close, and the rows below it waited the same way. But this one page she had kept clean. She had turned past it many times without writing there, and each time she had felt the small pull to fill it, and each time she had let the pull go by.

The girl noticed the gap on an afternoon when the light lay flat across the table. She ran a finger down the entries and found the place where the ink simply stopped, where a whole page of good paper sat bare between one full column and the next. She looked at Nyra, and Nyra only turned the page over and back, showing that nothing had been lost, that the blank was a thing chosen and not a thing missed.

A book kept for years fills without much thought. The hand writes what the day gives it, and the pages take the weight in order, and soon the early work sits far behind the recent work with no room between them. To leave a page empty on purpose is to argue with that habit. It is to say that not every space belongs to the one holding the pen.

Nyra had left the page for whoever came after. The girl would keep her own book, that was already true, but a day might come when she wanted to set a single line inside this one, beside the older seasons, in the middle of a record she had not started. The blank page waited for that line. It held a place the way a chair pulled out holds a place, plain and ready and meaning welcome.

The girl did not write there that day, and Nyra had not asked her to. Some room is kept open precisely so that no one has to fill it soon. It was enough that the page existed, that the book had been made a little wider than one keeper, that when the time came the space would be there, clean and waiting, exactly where a hand might reach for it.