Chapter 210: You Can Climb
I still had in mind the floating tear that had been before me.
It haunted me without hurting, like an image one does not forget because it touched something too deep to be named. It was neither sad nor beautiful. It was there, in me, suspended as it had been in the air — fragile, clear, unreal.
It had lasted only a moment. But that moment, that single heartbeat, was enough to make it exist forever in a corner of my memory.
I didn’t know if it was the tear I was carrying, or what it represented. A farewell. A promise. A remnant of who I had been. But it still shone, somewhere, in my gaze, in my throat, in my silences.
And even if it no longer existed, even if it had dissolved into the air like the child before it... I still carried it. Like proof. Like mourning. Like one heartbeat less, but one step more.
Just enough time to exist.
Just enough time to leave in me an indelible mark — not a scar, not a wound, no, but a vivid, intimate, deep imprint. One of those we don’t know how to name, that we’ll never truly tell, but that silently shape everything that comes after.
It had crossed my heart like a forgotten shiver, awakening a capacity I thought long dead: the ability to feel in a way other than through pain. A sensory memory. A pure trace. A gentle flaw in my armor.
And slowly... the image of that tear faded.
Without sound. Without sparkle. Without resistance. As if it knew it had fulfilled the reason it had come. It dissolved in my mind as it had dissolved in the air, with the same discreet grace, the same humility.
A crystalline memory, absorbed by nothingness.