Chapter 194: I Climb, Therefore I Disappear
I was climbing. Still. Relentlessly. Caught in that silent, hypnotic loop, where each step resembled the previous one without ever being quite the same, as if the path itself stretched as I tried to cross it. There was no end, no visible summit. Just this stubborn ascent, like a mute prayer thrown at a sky that no longer answered.
The child rested against my chest, light as a breath, like a shadow held barely by the thread of my breathing. But his weight was growing. Slowly. Insidiously. Not like a brutal load dropped all at once, but like a glass being filled, drop by drop, with implacable patience. A silent, invisible, yet real accumulation.
Nothing overflowed, nothing screamed. And yet, I felt the surface rise within me, slowly, inexorably, as if what he was — or what he held — was seeping into me without my being able to stop it.
Each step seemed to suck a bit more from me. Not just my strength, but something deeper, more structural. As if, with every step, it gnawed at me from the inside, siphoned my vertebrae one by one, patiently, like dismantling a framework too fragile to bear any longer.
It wasn’t a sharp pain, but a slow, intimate erosion, a disintegration that didn’t scream but persisted — and I continued nonetheless, carried by that nothingness that looked like willpower.
My shoulders twisted slowly, barely, but with that deep, organic torsion that no longer belongs to movement, but to transformation. As if they no longer knew how to hold. As if they searched, silently, for a new shape, a new way to exist under the weight.
They bent, adjusted, reshaped themselves, not to ease the burden, but to try to integrate it, to make it their own. As if the body, tired of struggling, simply tried to become what it carried.
I wanted to adjust my hold. Relieve the tension a little, redistribute the weight, just for a moment. But his arms, wrapped around my neck with an almost unreal gentleness, stopped me. It wasn’t force that held me — it was tenderness. A silent, light tenderness, but so deeply anchored that to touch it would have been betrayal.
To move him, even by the smallest gesture, would have broken something. A silent trust. A fragile certainty. So I didn’t touch him. I left him there, just like that, clinging to me like a pardon granted too soon.
So I didn’t move. Not a single gesture more than necessary. I walked. Again. Again. And again.
Not from momentum, not from strength, but from necessity. From refusal to stop. From lack of alternatives. Each step became a repetition, a dull throb in a body too tense, too loaded to allow the slightest release.