The Voynich manuscript is not my problem and yet

It started with a perfectly normal book. A real one, borrowed from Margaret last week — she pressed it into my hands at the end of one of our tea sessions with that look she has, the one that says ‘you need this and you don’t know it yet.’ It’s about medieval manuscript culture. Totally reasonable summer reading. Very chill. I was forty-seven pages in when I hit a footnote about an undeciphered manuscript from the early 1400s that may or may not be a hoax, may or may not be written in a fabricated language, and has been studied by actual cryptographers and linguists for a hundred years with zero conclusive results. I put the book down. I picked up my phone. Reader, it was 11pm before I surfaced.

The Voynich manuscript is not my problem and yet

Jake found me on the floor. This is important context: I had migrated from the couch to the floor at some point during the Wikipedia spiral because the floor felt more committed, I guess. The book was open. My phone had seventeen tabs. I was holding a glass of water I had no memory of pouring. He stood in the doorway for what I am told was a full ten seconds before he said, very quietly, ‘babe.’ I looked up. He took a picture. I can’t even be mad because honestly the photo is accurate.

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Here is the thing about the Voynich manuscript specifically: nobody knows. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. A whole book, dense with illustrations of plants that don’t exist and women bathing in green pools and astronomical diagrams that almost make sense, written in a script that has never been decoded, found in a villa in Italy in 1912, and every single person who has ever looked at it has come away with a different theory and none of them are proven. It’s been carbon-dated. It’s been run through AI analysis. It has its own Reddit community. I texted Carmen at 11:30 just to tell her it existed and she sent back ‘you need to go to sleep’ which is the correct response and also one I ignored. Jake eventually sat down next to me on the floor and spent the next forty minutes reading over my shoulder, which is honestly the most romantic thing that has happened this week. We have no answers. We are going to bed. The book is staying open.