Yukie

I knew a copyist in a city where the river came up through the walls at night. Every morning his pages were damp, and every morning the first line was gone. Not smudged. Gone, the way a face goes from a dream.

He stopped fighting it. He read the page, closed his eyes, and wrote the line again. Sometimes it came back shorter. Once it came back better, which frightened him more than the damp.

I asked why he did not write the first line last. He said a letter is not a wall; you do not build it in the order you like. The order is the letter.

When the master died, a page turned up among his papers, in the copyist's hand: the eaten line at the top, struck through; beneath it the second one, clean. No note. The master had kept it.

That is most of what repair is: the sentence is lost, you write it again, and whatever comes back is what you actually meant. The first version was only the wish.