Here, in this space suspended between gentleness and damnation, nothing truly died. Not pain. Not images. Not even memories — those shreds of lived moments, gnawed by time, putrefied in the conscience, but never quite dissolved. They remained there, clinging to the air, embedded in the soft matter of this world, floating like spores of undigested childhood, ready to settle again in a breach, in a crack, in a thought left too open.
So I continued. Slowly. With that strange slowness, that almost ceremonial heaviness, found in statues that are moved one breath at a time, in the dead that are raised for their final march — not to be saved, not to be judged, but simply to be made to cross. My legs no longer carried a body. They dragged a memory. An empty form. A shell where will had dislocated, but where walking, by habit, had carried on.
I was no longer a man.
I was a remnant.
