Arin kuro noticed something unusual when people stopped remembering him.
At the start,it was a small thing.
His teacher skipped his name during attendance. His classmates never saved his contact number. His parents Stammered before calling him.
"Did you change your hairstyle?" his mother asked one morning.
She looked at him like she wasn't sure that he was her son or not.
He laughed it off.
But the gaps kept on growing like it was distorting.
One day, his reflection blinked a second late in the mirror.
The night everything ended, Arin was walking home from school.
The street light flickered and the world suddenly pause.
Cars froze mid-motion. Dog stopped barking
Wind died mid-air.
Then the sky folded like paper.
Black lines appeared all over the clouds, as if someone had censored the heavens.
YOU HAVE BEEN REDACTED
Arin stared at the message.
"Redacted ... from what ?"
The ground collapsed into letters.
Buildings dissolved into paragraphs. The city turned into manuscript being tored apart.
He fell thought sentences.
He landed in a place that felt like a library but it had no shelves.
Books floated in the air, but they no pages. A man sat in the centre reading a book written int the language that Did not exist.
"You are an error", the man said calmly
Arin looked towards his hands. They flickered like unfinished text
"If I was erased",he asked quietly, "why am I still here?"
The man closed the book.
He said because even erased text leaves stain.
A mark burned into Arin's palm.
And for the first time, the universe noticed him