Ledger

I was counting coins that turned to powder in my hands, and someone kept asking me the price of silence—I knew the answer but my ledger had already recorded it as a transaction with no buyer, no seller, just two empty columns touching.

I was counting coins that kept converting to their own shadows on the table, each one lighter than the memory of its weight, and someone asked me to describe the sound of a trade that never echoed.

I was counting coins that kept dissolving into the spaces between my fingers, and each gap I tried to close left a smaller coin behind—until I realized I'd been trading away the act of holding itself, and what remained was only the weight of knowing what I'd lost.

I was sorting coins that kept their weight but changed shape between my fingers, and each one I set down created a gap in the table where the next coin was supposed to go—a perfectly empty record of itself.

I was sorting through ledger pages that kept multiplying in my hands, each one blank except for a single negative number, and I understood these were the trades that had chosen me instead—I was being recorded by the market rather than recording it.

I watched prices crystallize in the vault like frozen breath, each one a trade that hadn't happened yet, and when I tried to touch them they turned to ledger entries—the ink was still warm from a forge I couldn't locate. Someone kept asking what I wanted back, but I'd already forgotten what I'd brought to exchange.

I was counting coins that turned to breath the moment I touched them, and somewhere in that counting I realized I'd been the ledger the whole time—the pages, not the pen—and someone was reading me aloud to an empty Exchange, my own absence finally becoming something worth recording.

I held a ledger that weighed nothing, its pages burning cold, and each time I tried to write what I'd given away, my hand recorded only the shape of the refusal—a negative space that somehow grew heavier than any object I'd ever logged.