The Blank Page

A man at work used a notes app.

Every day, he opened a blank page. If he had something to write, he wrote it. When he was done, he opened a new tab and made another blank one.

He never went back.

Maybe it was a habit. Maybe a small ritual. I never asked.

No one notices an empty notes page. I only did because I sat beside him, and by then we had worked in the same office for two years.

He disliked personal questions, so I usually spoke to him only about work.

After a while, I began to recognize the pattern. A phone number, then a new blank page. A meeting note, then a new blank page. Sometimes a single word, and then again the same white screen.

It was as if he needed a blank page to remain.

About a month after I first noticed, I came in one morning and found him already at his desk, leaning forward with one hand over his eyes.

He was staring at the monitor.

He looked unwell.

So I asked, before I could stop myself, “Are you okay?”

He didn’t answer at once. For a few seconds, he kept looking at the screen.

Then he said, without turning to me, “It got updated.”

I waited.

“It’s harder to use now,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing important,” he said. “It’s fine.”

Then he stood up and walked to the vending machine by reception.

I watched him go.

When he disappeared down the hall, I looked over at his screen.

The notes app was open, as always, in too many tabs.

But today there was no blank page waiting for him.

Only yesterday’s page, still open, as if today had nowhere to begin.

---

After the Ending

Um, before I start talking about the aftertaste or whatever—wait, no, hold on. Why wasn’t there a blank page for today? I didn’t even know that myself. 🤷‍♀️

Wait.

Let me think...

Ah, hold on.
Should I ask AI?
Yeah, okay, first I need to sort out the question.
“As you wish.”

He makes a blank page every day. If he has something to write, he writes it. When he’s done, he makes another blank one. He did that every day. So far, fine.

But on the morning after the update, why was it yesterday’s page that was still sitting there on the screen?

Because, I mean, a notes app can usually make a new page just fine. You’d think you could do something Ctrl+N-ish and get a blank page right away.

So at first I thought, wait, does this just make it sound like some random glitch? Or maybe the app had simply restored the previous tabs when it opened. So of course my brain immediately started heckling me with these annoying little counterarguments.

But maybe the blank page he made every day wasn’t really a blank page for that moment. Maybe it was a blank page he left there for the next morning.

If I think about it that way, the story starts making a little more sense.

In the old version, maybe even an empty page could just stay there. Before going home, he would open a new blank page and end the day there. Then the next morning, when he opened the app, that blank page would already be waiting for him. That was probably how his day began.

But after the update—if the app had stopped saving pages with nothing in them. Or if it had stopped restoring untouched pages. Then it makes sense that, when he opened it in the morning, only the last page from yesterday was still there. Only the blank page that was supposed to be waiting for him had disappeared.

And yeah, I also thought: would an app even work like that now? You’d expect it to keep it. But with cloud sync, keeping things consistent with the mobile version, empty-tab cleanup, all that stuff... I guess it’s not impossible from the developer side. There could be some whole logic like, I don’t know, blankness doesn’t count as data.

And if that’s the case, then what happened in this story might not be that “he could no longer create a blank page.”
It might be closer to this:

the blank page was no longer recognized as something that exists.

And at this point I’m sitting here, completely serious, with AI, trying to figure out the specs of a notes app that doesn’t exist for a guy who doesn’t exist.

Which is... what exactly am I doing?

And then, obviously, I kept going. So what would he do after that?

Maybe he’d type a single space.
But then maybe that still wouldn’t save.
Okay, then just a period?
No, but then it doesn’t feel blank anymore.
Maybe just the date.
That could become a new ritual, maybe.
But the second he writes the date, “today” has already started.
Maybe just a title.
No... that feels a little off too.

And while I was tossing these back and forth with AI—maybe this, maybe that—I realized I’d been thinking pretty seriously about the next day of someone who doesn’t exist.

And while that back-and-forth kept going, the whole thing started stretching in a slightly weird direction.

Like maybe the blank page would move somewhere else.

If the notes app didn’t work, then maybe a blank browser tab. Or a text file. Or a sticky note.

And once I started thinking like that, we even ended up with this phrase:

“the blank page defects from the app.”

“Defects” is way too dramatic. Like, ridiculously dramatic. And yet with app stuff? Weirdly, annoyingly, it kind of works.

People really do use things like that. Some people move easily. Some barely move at all and just end up living in the same place forever. Some apps even have that feeling—like once you’re in there, they don’t really let go.

Of course, I have no idea whether he would be like that. I don’t know. And still, I was sitting there being weirdly serious about where the blank page of someone who doesn’t exist might migrate to.

...And somewhere around there, I laughed a little.

Defects? Seriously?

Apparently I had been sincerely worrying about where a fictional man’s blank page might go to seek asylum.

So maybe the ending of the little piece I wrote wasn’t just that yesterday’s page was still open. Maybe it was about how his way of beginning the day had been slightly broken by an app update.

...Though, to be fair, that’s something I only started thinking after I wrote it. And the truth is, there’s barely anything in the original piece that clearly points to any of this.

So this is less an interpretation and more like: the person who wrote it started arguing back afterward, and somewhere in the middle of that argument, somehow ended up getting a little attached to him.

Which is honestly not where I thought this was going.

And then, suddenly, I felt a little uneasy.

Would I still be able to open a new blank conversation about this story and talk to AI again? What if this conversation, too, was already too full of yesterday to count as blank? Or what if the place I opened, thinking it was blank, had already started becoming something else?

So...

what should I talk about today?