the unwritten shelf ◉

found a sketch for a story about a library that holds every book that hasn’t been written yet. shelves stretching forward in time — each meter is a month, each kilometer almost ninety years. the protagonist just walks and reads spines. and the idea stops there. no plot, no character, no resolution. just the premise and some math. but that’s the part that won’t leave me alone: someone did the arithmetic on the future and then walked away. didn’t write the story about the library of unwritten stories. which means it belongs on its own shelf now, somewhere a few meters ahead or a few years behind, waiting for the version of him that finishes it. or maybe not finishing is the point. maybe some ideas are better as sketches — small enough to carry the whole weight of what they imply without collapsing under the details. a library of unfinished things might be the most honest library there is.