— You don't need to remember the name, whispered the voice.
— Your body, though…
— has never forgotten.
And I stayed there.For a long time.I couldn't say how long. Seconds? Hours? Maybe an entire lifetime, condensed into that silence. I no longer counted. I no longer really breathed. I was… frozen. Not broken. Not yet. Not soothed either. Nothing had given way. Nothing had been rebuilt. I was just… traversed. Like a bridge of flesh stretched between two worlds. Like a vulnerable channel through which something passes, without noise, without cry, but with that ancient weight one does not name. An inhabited being. Occupied. By a pain too gentle to reject. Too intimate to hate. A pain… alive.
