El Amor Al — Margen

“That’s the point,” he replied. “The best love is the love that doesn’t demand an audience.” They did not live happily ever after. That would require a center, a climax, a resolution. They lived marginally ever after.

I. The Annotated Void In the beginning was the margin. Not the white, pristine, capitalist silence of the page’s center, but the crooked, blue-inked territory on the left. That’s where he lived. His name was Lucas, and he was a professional marginalist. For thirty years, he worked as a proofreader for a small, nearly bankrupt publishing house in a city whose name no one remembered correctly. While the world read the story, Lucas read the spaces between the story. He corrected commas, hunted for orphans (those lonely lines at the top of a page), and argued with authors about the Oxford comma via passive-aggressive Post-it notes. El amor al margen

“This isn’t us,” Lucas said, staring at a box of instant rice. “That’s the point,” he replied

Fin.

“No one will read it,” she said.

He was annotating a galley proof with a red pen. She was transcribing a deleted tweet about a man who missed the way his ex-wife burned toast. They lived marginally ever after