It was just a story.
That's what I told myself.
A silly draft, a moody experiment.
A lonely woman in a dark apartment, typing up nightmares.
A character who dies in Chapter One - electrocuted in the bathtub, alone.
A scene I thought was beautiful, tragic, poetic.
Then Mina, my upstairs neighbor, was found dead.
Electrocuted.
In her bathtub.
The same time I finished writing that scene.
I didn't panic.
Not really.
Coincidence. Has to be.
Writers imagine awful things all the time.
But it happened again.
In Chapter Four, a man jumps in front of a train.
I gave him a backstory: tired eyes, quiet life, no goodbye note.
Two days later, I saw the headline.
"Unidentified Male Dies by Train – No Note, No Witnesses."
And I recognized his face.
Because I made it.
I tried to stop.
Closed the document.
Burned the notebook.
Threw the hard drive out the window.
But the story kept writing itself.
Literally.
I woke up at 2:46 AM to the sound of typing.
My laptop was open.
The screen glowing.
The cursor blinking.
Words appeared on the screen - letter by letter - with no hands on the keyboard.
"Chapter Seven: The Woman Who Tries to Stop the Story."
The first line:
"She wakes up at 2:46 AM to the sound of typing."
I ran.
Left the apartment.
But somehow… the story followed.
New pages printed from the library computer while I passed by.
Text scrolled on digital billboards when I blinked.
A man on the bus tapped my shoulder and whispered:
"You forgot to write the ending."
And maybe he's right.
Because the story won't end on its own.
It's hungry.
It wants ink.
It wants names.
It wants me.
And when I tried to write someone else into the next scene - someone fake, just a placeholder - I couldn't.
The keyboard wouldn't let me.
It kept typing my name.
Over and over.
So now, I'm writing this.
Not as a confession.
Not as a warning.
But as the final chapter.
Because I've figured it out:
The story doesn't kill people.
It doesn't curse them.
It becomes them.
And when you finish reading this,
if you feel something behind you - a flicker, a whisper, a pulse in the ink -
it's your story now.