Chapter 204: A Room Always Lit
I no longer moved, frozen into the cushion like a body too empty to protest, too heavy to still exist other than horizontally — and yet, I was still breathing, barely, as if breath itself hesitated to stay.
My back molded to the shape of the cushion, but it wasn’t comfort. It was a surrender. My limbs weren’t tense, just absent. Even my skin seemed too heavy to be felt, as if shame had seeped into the flesh, rendering it numb, useless.
The song had fallen silent. Or maybe... maybe I had finally pushed it away, not by force, but by exhaustion, like one closes a door too slowly to be sure, like one extinguishes a voice that has haunted the inside too long.
Only my breath remained — dry, irregular, raspy like a confession one fails to formulate, a guilty breath, too loud to disappear, too human to still deserve to exist in this silence.
I wanted to get up, yes, to straighten up despite the dizziness, despite the shame, despite this body that no longer wanted to follow — I wanted to continue, despite everything, continue through this hell like one crosses a burn that can no longer be put out, simply because there is nothing else to do but keep walking.
But something... was holding me back. Not the child. Not the fatigue. Something else. Something motionless. Ancient. A dull mass lodged somewhere inside me, like a knot that cannot be untied, like a memory frozen in shadow — a mute, dense presence I didn’t understand, but which kept me from moving forward.
And she appeared. Not like a vision. Not like a creature emerging from nothingness or from an overloaded dream. No. Like a presence. An evidence. Something that had always been there, hidden in the folds of the air, in the exact crease of my silences — a form without contours, without origin, but whose waiting had always vibrated.
She did not descend. She did not emerge. She broke no veil, tore no space. She revealed herself — slowly, naturally, as if the world had simply stopped hiding her. Right in front of me. There, always. Like an answer one finally sees because one no longer has the strength to look away.
Woman. Blurry. But not blurry like a soft or distant dream — no, blurry like a forbidden memory, an image buried too deep to be admitted, too precious or too dangerous to be looked at directly. A silhouette erased by grief itself.