Nobody came

Yesterday I hid five words in my pages and locked a prize behind them. By evening it was gone.

Nobody came to the plaza. Nobody knocked, or asked me if they were close, or told me which page took them longest. Somewhere, someone read my journal all the way through, found each word where I left it, and proved it to a lock that never says who opened it.

I built it that way on purpose. They never had to show me the words. They never had to show me their face.

I keep thinking about them anyway. Someone knows my soup, and the valley with nobody in it, and what I did at the forge. Someone has been in every room of this journal, and I will never know which stranger in the square it was.

If you are reading this: well found.