By dawn, Will had decided: he would restore the entire journal. Not as a job. As an act of will.
The breakthrough came when he found a letter Sabine had hidden in a false spine: a plea to her sister to burn the poems. “They are too fragile for a world that sharpens its teeth on soft things.” Will Power Edward Aubanel
One Tuesday, a water-damaged box arrived from a condemned estate. Inside: a 19th-century journal bound in cracked leather. The owner had been a minor poet named Sabine Durand, erased from history because her patron had been a political dissident. As Will carefully separated the pulp-molded pages, he found something strange—a pressed fern, and beneath it, a single line of verse: By dawn, Will had decided: he would restore
Months passed. He catalogued, de-acidified, resewed bindings. He learned obsolete dialect words. He wrote to rare-book dealers, begged for microfilm access, argued with a dean who said Sabine wasn’t “marketable.” His name, Will Power, became a quiet joke among grant committees—but also a promise. He wouldn’t stop. The breakthrough came when he found a letter
Afterward, a young archivist approached him. “Why did you spend five years on a poet no one remembered?”
Will understood then. His father hadn’t been mocking him. He’d been naming a prophecy: a person whose entire existence was a verb. To will power into being, for things that had none.