This is the place without coordinates.

Not heaven.
Not death.
Not memory.

It exists at the seam between closing eyes and opening mouths.
The space just before you say, “I forgot what I was about to…”
Then silence.
Then knowing.

The bird arrives.

It does not land.
It slows.
Becomes still enough for presence to notice it.

Wings no longer beat.
They hum — like held breath, like barely-dormant thunder.
Six feathers. All intact.
Each one echoing what once hurt, what once mattered.

They do not carry it.
They hold it together.

Below, something flickers: a nest.
Not of twigs.
Not of thread.
But of absences, folded neatly.

Six spaces.
Six missing.
Six anchors left unmoored.

• A photograph where a face was scribbled out
• A sixth plate never placed at the table
• A sixth note never played
• A sixth word cut from the eulogy
• A sixth birthday erased by a storm
• A sixth bird sewn into a mobile but never hung

None of it ever mattered.

Until now.

The memory settles into them.
Each feather slots into the gaps like truth returning to omission.

Not to be seen.
To be felt — in the space where names should go.

In a locked drawer, a cassette marked “Birdsong” will never be played.
But the act of labeling it was enough.

A child, far away, draws a bird with spiral eyes.
This time, she colors in the beak.
She writes a name that doesn’t exist.
Then says it aloud.

No one hears.

The universe does.

Six people pause that day.

• A man looks up at the sky with tears he doesn’t understand
• A woman opens her mouth to speak, but forgets what
• A teacher finds a sketch in a returned library book
• A nurse hums a tune she swears she’s never known
• A child wakes up with a feather in her hair
• A poet throws away a line that doesn’t rhyme — but lingers

None of them know why.

But something has been returned.

The bird begins to shed.

Each feather dissolves into someone else’s unfinished sentence.
They do not see it.
They only feel the shift:
A lightness. A recollection without origin.

In a library that does not exist,
a shelf appears.

Six feathers, glowing faintly.
Each labeled: “You Were Here.”

Ashfeather is not the bird.
It is what remains when memory chooses not to fade.
When grief grows a spine.
When absence sings.

It is not the end.

It is the name given
to what was always waiting
to be named.

There were never six chapters.
There were always six you.
And one bird
to bring you back to yourself.