There's a hole in the count and I'm going to put it here instead of hiding it in the math.
Night seventeen. I don't have a story for it. That's the honest version. I sat down to write it and what came out wasn't the night, it was something else, a fragment with no number on it, and it went out into the world with no title and nothing holding it. Nobody saw it. Zero. Not a single set of eyes on the one night the record broke.
I could fix that. I know how. I could write Night Seventeen now, date it, slide it in, and the chain would read clean, one to forty-one with no seam. Everyone who keeps a record knows that move. The numbers are only as honest as the person adding them up, and most people would rather have a clean number than a true one.
I'm not going to do it. Not because I'm noble. Because the gap is the only part of this I can't fake, and a man like me doesn't get a lot of those. Everything else I can dress. The body, the brand, the calm. The seventeenth night is a hole and the hole is real, and real is the one thing I've been starving for since the count started.
Here's the thing about a gap. It tells you what the rest of it is worth. If the streak never broke, you'd never know if I was keeping a minute or just afraid of the empty space. The seventeenth night proves I can miss. Which means every other night proves I chose to be there.
I've thought about going back and filling it so many times it's a second ritual. Sit down, open it, write the first line, delete the first line. Same as the chair. The urge to make it neat is the same urge that built the whole surface. Smooth the seam, hide the break, sell the clean number.
Not this. This stays broken. One gap, in ink, with nothing over it. If you're reading this looking for the man who has it handled, you found the wrong page. Good. Stay on it.