Chapter 150: Keep Lying
That something — that mouthless whisper, that formless word — crept into my body with the delicacy of an unsuspected blade, sliding between two heartbeats, between two sighs, between two fibers too tired to resist anymore. It wasn’t a thought. Not a memory. It was a raw truth, bare, embedded in the unconscious like a sacred splinter one never quite manages to extract. A vibration placed under the tongue, in the hollow of the heart, beneath the sternum, in the marrow — everywhere one never dares to look.
It didn’t command me. It didn’t caress me. It didn’t judge.
It acknowledged.
And that acknowledgment struck through me like an ancient certainty: you’re still here. Not whole, not worthy, not strong — but here. You cry, therefore you breathe. You collapse, therefore you exist. You reject love, therefore it still lives somewhere. You say you want to die... but you scream to be heard.
And in that tiny, almost shameful spark, something lit up.
Not a light.
A remnant.
A glimmer.
A refusal to disappear, no matter how miserable, how painful, how weak.
An instinct, perhaps. The kind wounded beasts have. The one that survives despite itself. The one that breathes still, even when the air burns.
A murmur of unknown origin but of certain destination, as if it had always known where to lodge itself, how to find me, how to slip between the layers of pain, between the crumpled membranes of what I thought was my silence. It wasn’t trying to be heard. It didn’t fight the noise of my sobs or the weight of my collapsed body. It settled. Inside me. Like a buried breath that had never stopped beating, hiding beneath the screams, beneath the blows, beneath the shattered memories.