Chapter 207: It Wasn’t Me… Yes. It Was Me
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Author’s note: Read the Chapter after ’it takes two’ before this one. enjoy your reading :)
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I hadn’t looked back in a long time. Maybe since the statue. Maybe since the confession. I was still climbing, endlessly, in that spiral without end, that path suspended between the sky and nothing. But something was different. Subtle. Almost imperceptible. A faint softness slipped into the loop. Not comfort. Not joy. But a form of acceptance. A breath a little less painful. A gravity a little less crushing.
The loop was still there, yes — repetitive, narrow, demanding. But it felt a little more livable. A little more human. As if, now, it was no longer a trap. Just a passage. And as long as I kept climbing, even slowly, even exhausted... I was no longer running away.
The child against my chest. Silent. Warm. Present. His small body breathed in rhythm with mine, sometimes offbeat, sometimes echoing, like a fragile music still searching for its tempo. He didn’t speak, but he had weight. Not as a burden, no. As a reality. As a truth one finally accepts to carry without wanting to set it down.
His arms around me did not squeeze. They rested. And that simple contact, that bare, defenseless closeness, reminded me with every step that I was no longer alone. That I didn’t have to be.
My breath steadier. My head held higher.
There was something infinitesimal there, maybe invisible to the outside eye, but which, in me, marked an entire shift. A slightly more regular breath, a rhythm no longer just trying to survive but to hold. A head that no longer bowed under the weight of shame or the past, but that, without pride, without victory, rose. Just a little. Just enough.
It wasn’t a glorious straightening, not a triumphant return. It was more discreet, more intimate, more true. A fragile verticality, like that of a broken tree that, despite everything, keeps growing, keeps reaching upward. And that movement, that unflashy straightening, was already a refusal. A refusal to go back down. A refusal to dissolve into silence.
I walked. Still. Less out of will than out of necessity. Because now... something in me wanted to see how far I could climb.