My family...?
I had one, didn’t I? On Earth. Sowhere. Surely. That’s what we’re supposed to have. An origin. A ho. A line behind us. I must have known that. A mother. A father. A presence, at least. A na whispered with tenderness. A shared al. A voice gently scolding . Sothing. Soone.
And yet...
I saw nothing.
Nothing precise. Nothing warm. Nothing stable. Not even a blurry silhouette. Not even a scent. Not a room. Not a burst of laughter. Nothing ca up. Even forcing it, even diving deep inside myself, there was only white. A wall without cracks. A silent screen.
Why?
Why did that particular void choke ? Why did that precise absence, that singular gap, that gaping hole at the center, freeze more than all the nightmares endured, more than all the monsters faced, more than all the deaths dodged? Why did that hollow, that simple hollow, make want to scream louder than blood, louder than fear?
I didn’t understand.
I fled. Even here. Even this. Even that mory. Or that absence of mory. I could feel it, in my bones, in my nape, in my tongue: sothing refused to rise. Sothing I had rejected. Crushed. Forgotten from having tried too hard to rember it.
And that refusal... that silence... broke .
Because I couldn’t.
Not even that.
Not even rember... those who should have been the first faces. The first hands. The first words.
And that was the worst part.
Not the war.
Not the death.
Not the loneliness.
But that void.
The one that carried my na, with no one left to say it.
And I stayed there.
Thinking.
For a long ti. Far longer than I would have thought possible. Far longer than a coherent thought, or even a mory, could last. I stayed there, motionless, silent, not even breathing beyond the surface, letting my mind turn in on itself, again, again, again — until every idea lost its shape, every mory dissolved, every certainty wrinkled.
I was thinking, yes... but not about sothing. Not to search. Not to understand. Just out of habit. Like a machine that no longer has a purpose but keeps running, in the void, so as not to shut down. My mind eroded itself on the sa stones, returned to the sa shadows, the sa holes.
It had beco a loop.
A slow, worn-out spiral, where each thought only brought the next back to the starting point, as if ti itself had frozen inside . Even the silence wore down. Not the silence of words. The one that pulses inside. The one you hear between two heartbeats. The one that clings to the skin when nothing cos for you anymore.
I was getting used to the fatigue.
That’s the worst part. I no longer fought it. I didn’t even hope for it to leave. It had beco a background. A texture. An atmosphere. It held , contained , almost rocked . A cocoon of weariness so dense it beca familiar. Almost gentle.
And I stayed there.
Endlessly.
Without expectation.
Without a na.
I was weary.
But with a weariness vaster than the body, duller than boredom, older than pain. I was weary even of doing nothing, of thinking nothing, of expecting nothing. Weary of the void, weary of breath, weary of this torpor that held like a tepid sea in which one stops swimming simply because the shore is no longer visible. Weary of waiting — that waiting that said nothing, promised nothing, never ended. Weary of absence, not only of others, but of myself, of my outlines, of my reasons.
Weary... of .
Of what I had beco. Of what I no longer was. Of that blurry figure I wore like a faceless mask. I would have liked to fall asleep standing, to vanish without a gesture, to lt without a cry into that nothingness that had already adopted as its own.
So, without a jolt, without clear reason, without even the idea that there could be an after, a change, a continuation — I stood up.
Not like one gets up.
But like one slides out of a dream too long.
A simple movent. Without montum. Without aning. Almost chanical. A silent jolt of sothing that, perhaps, refused to die completely.
I left the cocoons.
With slow steps. Slippery. As if my legs still hesitated to respond, as if the air itself weighed against my ankles, as if sothing — silently, without truly holding back — refused to let go. They didn’t hold . But they didn’t let leave either. I felt their presence, no longer as a place, but as an imprint, a dull dampness clinging to my skin, like the sweat of a nightmare from which you never truly wake.
Their vibrations were still there.
No longer around. But within .
They had seeped beneath the surface, had found their way to my nerves, my bones, my organs. They still pulsed, discreetly, deeply, like a forgotten breath refusing to extinguish. An installed shiver. A tepid, continuous tension, no longer expressed through jolts but through a presence — fine, constant, inalterable.
I felt it in my spine.
A diffuse beat between my shoulder blades.
A strange warmth nestled in the hollow of my belly.
Like a wordless music. An ancient lody, foreign, but recognized by my body as a chant from before. Sothing organic. Sacred, maybe. A flesh mory my mind would have wanted to erase, but my body, it, refused to forget.
I still carried their rhythm.
Even outside.
Even after.
And that damn sound...
Still there.
BOOM.
BOOM.
BOOM.
A dull shock, regular, muffled — but inevitable. Not a noise. Not a vibration. An impact. Rhythmic. Visceral. Too deep to co from outside, too insistent to entirely belong to my body. It resonated everywhere. In the air. In my temples. In my heels. In my chest. BOOM. BOOM. Again. Always. Like a heart that refused to die. Like a drum buried beneath the world. Like a presence pounding from within.
The heartbeat of the world.
Or maybe mine.
I no longer knew. I no longer distinguished the origin. I no longer wanted to. I no longer searched. Even doubt was too heavy. So I let it beat. I let it be. I no longer had the strength to decide what ca from and what invaded .
But I kept going.
One step.
Then another.
Always straight ahead. Not by choice. Not by will. Just because I had to. Because stillness would have broken otherwise. Because movent, even empty, at least had the advantage of wearing out.
Toward what?
I had no idea.
But I moved forward.
Toward silence, maybe.
Toward that blank space where the beating would stop. Where everything would finally end. Where even the noise of myself would go quiet. Where there would only be air. Or nothing.
At last...
I hoped so.
And that hope, so faint, so thin, still held upright.
I walked.
Or maybe I drifted. It was blurry. Slow. Without montum. A progression without real direction, as if my legs followed an impulse older than , wearier than thought. I wasn’t walking to go sowhere. I walked because stopping felt worse.
I crossed that extinguished world once more.
That territory without outlines, without sky, without end — that fossilized dream where light no longer shone, where shadows no longer even bit, a frozen in-between, deserted, hollow, inhabited only by the remnants of . I knew that place. I had walked it a hundred tis, maybe a thousand. And every step had left a mark no one would ever see.
An endless dream.
A nightmare drained of fear. A world too slow to frighten anymore. Too tepid to kill. Too soft, almost, in its way of numbing. A forgetfulness spread across infinity, painless, shapeless, but suffocating nonetheless.
A tepid womb.
Yes. That was it. A womb of oblivion. A matrix without love, without promise. Sothing that wrapped not to keep , but to slowly extinguish . As if I had returned inside a world that never wanted to bring into the world.
And yet, I still walked.
In that limp nothingness. In that motherless mory.
And in front of ... it was there.
An islet.
Solitary. Massive. Suspended alone in the abyss, like a forgotten fragnt of the world carried by nothing, pulled by nothing, explained by nothing. It didn’t fall. It didn’t rise. It floated. Motionless. Frozen in an ancient sleep, levitating for no reason in that space without wind, without sky, without clear light.
It looked like a dream stopped in the middle of a sentence.
A materialized silence.
A word too heavy to be spoken.
Nothing connected it to anything. No roots. No bridges. No signs of passage. It was an island without origin, without path, without promise of return. It rested there, in the void, like a fossilized secret, frozen in a forgetfulness so deep that even the gods, perhaps, had erased it from their mory.
It seed to wait.
Or rather: it seed not to have waited for anyone in a long ti.
Its surface, at first smooth, revealed here and there fissures, light cracks, as if ti had tried to scratch its mark, to wear it down, to reduce it to nothing — without ever quite succeeding. A pale whiteness, almost spectrally clean, covered the stone, a whiteness of dust or ash, like a garnt too old to dare wash.
It was there.
Intact, and yet gnawed.
Forgotten, and yet present.
And looking at it, a thought crossed without words: sothing, here, had been left for .
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