She closed the notebook. In the dark, she whispered to herself: Excogi, ergo sum — I think it through, therefore I am.
By midnight, the page held not chaos but a kind of ugly geometry — truths she had been afraid to touch. Her hand trembled. But that was the price of thinking something into existence.
She wrote in fragments. Crossed them out. Drew a daisy in the margin, each petal a possibility: leave, stay, speak, wait, burn it all down . Then she excogitated further. What would happen if she chose petal three? What dominoes fell?
She didn’t stumble upon answers. She excogitated them — slow, deliberate, like roots pushing through frost.