The morning stretched her pale arms through the curtains, casting a milky light on the walls. A light rain traced hesitant lines on the glass, as if the sky itself were trying to write something. G opened his eyes half-open.
She remained motionless. His breath was short, irregular, as if he were following a rhythm from elsewhere. She put a hand to his throat. Something gripped her—an unspeakable emotion, coming from a dream she hadn't grasped. Only a residue: a blurred image, a look, perhaps, or a place between two worlds.
She turned her head on the pillow, and thrust her face into the still warm sheet. Her eyelids closed again, but sleep refused to return. A dense silence surrounded him, so heavy that he seemed to breathe beside her. She frowned slightly. This silence had the presence of a voice which one did not hear, but which one felt insisting.
She half sat up, her eyes blank, fixed on the gray sky outside the window. The rain drew chaotic veins of water that crossed each other without ever joining. She followed one of them with her eyes, as if she could read an answer. Nothing. Just this tenacious feeling of an inhabited emptiness.
G let himself fall back on the mattress. His body sank into the hollow of the bed, but his mind remained suspended. She closed her eyes again. A tension prevented him from relaxing. She would have liked to go back. Plunge back into the dream. To find this suspended moment, this face can be invented. A strange nostalgia swept over her—for something she'd never really experienced.
Her fingers played mechanically with the edge of the sheet. She stayed like this for a few moments, then pulled the covers up to her chin. The movement was slow, almost ceremonial. Hide? Retreat? She didn't know if she was fleeing or looking for refuge.
A shiver ran through her. She curled up more, her legs brought against her stomach. His heart beat faintly, as if the world outside was also beating in slow motion. Perhaps this dream, that night, carried within it a more tangible truth than this morning drenched in grey.
She opened her eyes again. Just a second.
What if...
Was he still there, somewhere? Just a breath away. At the blink of an eyelid.
Then, slowly, she sat up and sat up on her bed, holding her notebook in her hands. The fabric of the sheet slipped through her fingers, still warm from her restless night. The morning silence was not empty, but charged with that fragile tension that precedes a decision or a confession. A crow croaked somewhere in the morning mist, as if to break the thick calm of the room.
The wall opposite, bare, let a light shadow dance. She watched him for a moment, fascinated by the way the light changed the contours of things. Perhaps this was what she was looking for: another way of seeing, of feeling, of being.
The pages remained blank, despite her efforts to put on paper what she felt. The previous day had only lasted a moment, but that moment seemed to stretch beyond reason, clinging to her like a soft and oppressive shadow at the same time.
"You're still empty. Like me. Or am I the one who is afraid to fill you? We should start with a word. Just a word. But which one?" – "I feel like if I write, I'm going to make it all real. And I'm not sure I'm ready." – "What I felt yesterday... It was fleeting, but enormous. I can't forget it. "
The rain continued to fall gently. She closed the notebook without opening it.
The Need to Escape: Oppressive Room
The room was quiet. Nothing moved. Not even air. G stood up slowly, as if every movement might upset a precarious balance. She put the notebook on the table without having opened it. His gaze swept the walls, the furniture, the objects. Everything seemed to be covered in a fine dust of inertia. Even the light, pale grey, refused to cut through the shadow.
She took a few steps, brushing the edge of a frame with her fingertips. She stopped. The photo behind the glass stared at her, mute. She took it, looked at it for a moment, then put it down gently, without putting it back exactly as she had found it. A crack in the wall caught his eye. She knew her. She had seen her a thousand times. But today, she gave him the impression of watching him back.
Her fingers trembled slightly as she opened the closet. She took out a cloak that was too large, which she put on without haste. He felt something familiar. From afar. A memory that has remained on a fabric. She tightened the collar against her neck like a blanket pulls over a cold body. Then, without thinking, she slipped her notebook into her bag. An automatic gesture. Like a promise that she might not keep.
She took one last look at the room. Nothing had changed, and yet everything weighed. She walked to the door, slowly turned the handle. A breath of moist air immediately entered, biting. She took a deep breath, then crossed the threshold without looking back.
The corridor smelled of confinement. The narrow walls seemed to whisper. She looked down, her arms clasped around her. His step was slow but determined. Each step, an attempt at rupture. Each march, a detachment. She didn't know exactly where she was going. But she knew she couldn't stay there any longer.
The outside, at least, had the merit of existing. To move. To ignore his questions. She walked down the stairs unhurriedly, her heart beating a little faster than usual.
It was an escape, perhaps. But a flight in which she finally felt a little air passing.
The key in the lock made a sharp noise. The outside world, even if foggy, seemed almost welcoming to him. It was an escape, perhaps, but she preferred it to the weight of those walls which knew her silence too well.
Back to the bookstore: A silent quest
Her steps led her instinctively to the bookshop. As she pushed open the door, she found the familiar smell of paper and old wood, but the place seemed emptier than the day before. The light from the hanging lamps reflected off the still damp ground, and an unusual silence seemed to envelop the rays.
An old clock, hanging on the back wall, beat its ticking with oppressive slowness. Each beat seemed to pull time backwards, as if it refused to move forward. G approached it. She remained there, erect, almost motionless, following with her eyes the pendulum which swayed like a constrained breath. His breath adjusted to this foreign rhythm.
On the coffee table, a small notebook—with metal corners and a worn leather cover—remained open. The fine writing that covered him seemed to belong to another life. G tilted his head slightly, without reaching out. She just stared at him, her gaze fixed, as if the words were going to reveal themselves from a distance. Around her, silence was not empty. He had a density. A yellow, subdued light filtered through a high lamp, enveloping the space in a suspended light.
She took a step back, suddenly disturbed by her own immobility. His eyes swept the room, searching without searching. An unconscious movement pushed her to turn away. She slowly moved between the shelves, her fingers sliding over the edges of the books without stopping. The old bindings, the laminated covers, the erased titles: everything became a pretext to divert one's thoughts. But his spirit resisted.
She slows down in front of a lower shelf. Something had led her there, without logic. His gaze was lost among the books. Then she straightened up, slightly tense. There was no one there. Nothing but the rustling of distant pages, the discreet footsteps of strangers, absorbed in their own worlds. No familiar faces. No look.
She sat down on the edge of an empty armchair, her back straight, her hands resting on her knees. His coat slipped slightly over his shoulder, revealing tension in the back of his neck. She scrutinized the entrance, without really assuming it. At every sound, she held her breath. But no one.
She looked away. The emptiness lodged itself in his chest, discreet but clear, like an internal shadow. She tightened her scarf around her neck, then stood up with a sharp gesture, as if chasing away an overly insistent ghost. She made a last slow turn in the aisle, her features frozen. Then, without a word, she headed for the exit.
Just before she walked through the door, she paused for a second. His gaze returned to the interior. Nothing. Still nothing. She nodded imperceptibly, as if to convince herself to continue. And went out, leaving behind her an open notebook, a suspended beat, and a somewhat heavier void.
She stopped in front of a shelf where a collection of poems stood. She took it, leafed through it, but the words didn't make sense, and she put it back in place, her heart heavy with a disappointment she refused to admit.
"The words dance but don't touch me. They float above me. I feel like I'm somewhere else. I feel absent from myself. "Why can't they find the exact spot where I'm bleeding? Maybe I've become impervious to words. Or too full to accommodate them. "I thought that books knew how to console. Today, they are silent."
B in the shadow of his memories
B had not left his apartment that morning. The persistent rain pounded the windows with a gloomy regularity, a liquid mirror of his inner state. He sat motionless, facing the window, his gaze lost on the soaked sidewalks where wrapped up figures ran. Everything was moving out there. He didn't. He seemed to be grafted to his chair, his hands inert on his knees, a prisoner of a present that had ceased to vibrate.
The distant rattle of a pipe sounded like a mechanical reminder: he was still breathing, but not really living. He blinked, slowly. Below, a woman was crossing the street, pressed under her umbrella. He did not even see her face. He could no longer see anything. Just the traces of the world he could no longer reach.
On the coffee table, the photo that had been there since the day before gave him a pale glow. He stared at her for a long time. Three faces: a man, a woman, and this boy between them, luminous, his gaze still charged with innocence. That boy was him. Before the fracture. Before the disappearance. He stretched out his hand, put it down. His gesture barely trembled, but his whole body seemed weighed down by a memory that was too dense.
His fingers brushed the corner of the frame. He would have liked to turn it around, to hide this life that he no longer recognized. But he remained there, his shoulders tucked in, almost in apnea. His father's look in the photo shone with a pride he had never been able to find. His mother's voice, gentle but worried, seemed to stand the test of time. He looked away. This image hurt him too much for him to forget it, and too little for him to abandon it.
He stood up slowly, as if he were coming out of the ground. A movement towards the window, then another, automatic. On the ledge, a withered plant leaned outward, deprived of light and attention. He turned her towards the gray light, with an almost clumsy gesture. The effort took his breath away more than he should. He stood for a moment, his hand resting on the cold rim, his eyelids closed.
The memories flowed back without him summoning them. A hospital corridor. The hum of a machine. A broken voice that he had never forgotten. The air seemed too narrow to him. He took a deep breath, but his torso froze. An invisible pressure was compressing him from within.
He ran a hand over her face. This morning was no different from the others. And yet, a disturbance inhabited him. Since the day before. From this bookstore. Since her. Her face imposed itself on him, with the troubling sweetness of an enigma. This brief but dense glance had left a strange burn in him. Like an old wound, revived for no reason.
He let himself fall back into the chair, this time heavier. The image of the young woman still floated in his memory, imposing itself on the sounds of the rain. She had not told him anything. She had done nothing. But something had moved inside him. Something invisible, but tangible. And that was enough to shake everything.
"I don't know his name. But I can still hear the silence she left when she left. It was brief. But it was real. And since then, I've been going off the rails." – "Why her? Why this moment? Maybe because she had a twin melancholy in her eyes. I don't want to believe that it was a coincidence. But I'm afraid to believe it." – "How about I go out? What if I tried to cross this chance again? No. Not yet. Not now. The world is not ready. Or maybe it's me."
A missed meeting
G finally left the bookstore, the air colder than she had imagined. She walked without a clear direction, her thoughts drifting with the same fluidity as her steps. She stopped in front of an art gallery, attracted by a painting in the window.
The canvas hanging in the window represented a misty, almost liquid landscape, where the hues mingled in a dreamlike blur. G approached it instinctively, short of breath. She stood there, motionless, staring at this abstract composition. The outlines of the painting vibrated slightly under the trembling light of the street. Something in this image grabbed her—a silent, intimate call.
She took a step forward, as if she were entering this featureless world. An indistinct silhouette could be seen in the center of the décor, blended into the uncertain décor. G raised a hand without thinking about it, placed it against the window. The cold of the glass brought her back to her own border. It was she, this lost figure. What she could not say, painting expressed effortlessly.
His gaze slid over a blurred line, a faded hue — and a burning was felt in his chest. It was not the beauty that moved her, but what she suspected behind it. A wound hidden in the very texture of the brush.
Behind her, the street lived slowly. A warm breath rose, carrying away a crumpled paper that swirled around the legs of passers-by. He rose for a moment, hesitated between two directions... then fell back to the ground, ignored. This small paltry movement seemed to embody their trajectories — wrapped around each other, never coming together.
A child suddenly crossed the street, holding a red balloon. G stopped. The red burst into the gray of the scene a discordant, vivid, and unexpected note. The suspended moment closed on her. She took a step back, abandoning the canvas, her soul still capsized.
At the same time, B was coming out of a parallel alley. He didn't look around. His closed, tense face betrayed the inner struggle that pushed him to walk, without direction. He hadn't dressed to go out—just slipped into a worn-out, hastily shod coat. But the apartment had become unbreathable.
His footsteps resounded faintly on the soggy pavement. He walked slowly, as if he were trying to avoid an encounter and provoke it at the same time. In his pocket, his fingers clutched a bookstore ticket, crumpled by hesitation. He wanted to believe that seeing her again was possible. Or at least, plausible.
At an intersection, he slows down. His gaze slid over the passing faces. None of them caught his attention. And yet, he continued to move forward, as if driven by an invisible tension. He turned into a perpendicular street, just a few meters before he met G. An almost imperceptible decision, but enough to maintain the mystery.
G resumed his walk, his pace slowed down by the weight of the moment. She looked up, for no specific reason, and stared at the corner where B had just disappeared. A mute intuition brushed against him, almost painful. Something had vibrated in the air. Like an absence that is too full.
At that precise moment, B had turned around, briefly, without knowing why. His gaze swept the empty space behind him. Then he resumed his journey. Chance had just closed, once again.
Return to oneself
Later, G sat on a bench in a small abandoned park, his hands clutching his notebook without opening it. In front of her, an empty fountain reflected the gray sky.
A dead leaf floated for a moment on the surface of the fountain before slowly sinking. She followed his descent with her eyes, disturbed by the way things disappear noiselessly. The silence weighed heavier than ever.
The metallic creaking of an empty swing startled G. The park, deserted, had no other life than that of the wind, insistent, almost mocking. She tightened her coat and stood up slowly, her notebook closed against her, tight like a talisman. She stepped forward, her slow steps on the damp flagstones, and her gaze glided towards the empty fountain. The water had not flowed there for a long time. She stood there, motionless, gazing at her own murky reflection in the tarnished stone.
She took out her notebook, opened it hesitantly, but no line came. The pencil remained suspended, useless. His hand quivered, as if waiting for an inner signal. She closed it. It was not yet the time. Through his eyes, the landscape seemed to melt away, like a face that we think we recognize without being able to identify it. She frowned, troubled. A hazy memory stirred in the silence.
A step back, a short breath. She walked along the fountain, brushed it with her fingertips, as if to feel if there was something alive left. There was only coldness. She continued to walk, slowly, her mind in motion. She was not expecting anyone. Yet her gaze was lost in the crowd, waiting in spite of herself for a sign, a silhouette. Was it him she was looking for, or that part of herself that she had felt eluding her since childhood?
Her thoughts took her back further. To years of silent solitude, spent in the midst of others. She had always kept her distance, not knowing how to cross the invisible glass that separated her from the world. There had been laughter, of course, faces, gestures. But she remembered it as one remembers a theatre set: pretty, but hollow. She stopped under a tree, looked up at the leaves. A memory flashed through her chest, vivid, brutal: the moment when she had understood that one could live without being seen. Since then, she had filled the gaps as best she could—with colors, pages, silences.
And then this man. Crossed for barely a few seconds, but carrying a void similar to his own. She didn't know his name, or his story. But she had recognized something familiar in him. An absence. A flaw.
Meanwhile, B was walking slowly between the shelves of a bookstore on the other side of town. His fingers slipped absentmindedly over the covers, but his mind was elsewhere. He stopped in front of a shelf, read a title, without really seeing it. He crouched down, observed a line of books as one scrutinizes a riddle. Nothing caught his attention — except for the strange feeling of having returned to a charged, almost sacred place.
He straightened up, his gaze a little lost. Had he come looking for an answer? Or just the reassuring silence of these places filled with other voices? He took a step to the side, brushed against a young woman without seeing her. He was not looking for a book, but for a trace, a clue. A confirmation.
He ran a hand through his hair, exasperated by his own confusion. What if it was there, somewhere in this city? The idea electrified him as much as it paralyzed him. He had never been able to hold back those who mattered. But this time, he wasn't sure he still had a choice.
A new crossroads
The day was slowly fading, gradually erasing the contours of the streets. G walked along the sidewalk, absorbed in her thoughts, her gaze barely gliding over the terraces full of life. In front of a busy café, she slows down. The hubbub of voices, the clinking of glasses, the light music that escaped reached him as if through a veil.
She put a hand on the window, then immediately withdrew it. Too much life at once. Too much light. And yet, something in her was wavering, a confused desire to enter it, to be part of this movement.
But she resumed her walk, with a slow step, a blank stare. A hesitation brushed against him, almost imperceptible, like an inner whisper. Was it the wind, or an old memory that had awakened? Behindher, the door of the café remained ajar, letting in a fragment of a familiar song.
A few moments later, B came out of the bookstore, his mind still clouded by the silence of the shelves. He walked with his hands in his pockets, his face downcast. His steps led him to the same café, without him looking up. The same music reached his ears, stopping him for a brief moment.
He recognized the air. An old summer song. It brought a strange warmth to his throat, a ball of emotion that he hadn't anticipated. His gaze slid into the café for a moment, but saw nothing. Just laughter. Shadows in motion. He frowned, as if something had escaped him, and then resumed his walk.
A few meters away, G had stopped at a pedestrian crossing. She turned her head slightly, catching a shiver in the air, a tension. As if someone, somewhere, was thinking of her. But there was only the city, indifferent.
A page of newspaper detached itself from the pavement, carried by a sudden breath. It swirled between them, unnoticed, before disappearing into the gutter. The wind intensified, as if the city itself was holding its breath.
And suddenly, everything started again. The flow of passers-by. The rumble of a bus. The music of the café. The empty chair that a man knocked over on his way out, causing a sharp crash that pierced the suspended calm. G shuddered slightly. B stopped barely a second further, before continuing.
In the window of a shop, their reflections brushed against each other. Two silhouettes superimposed without seeing each other, melted into the glass, one receding, the other withdrawn. A coincidence without conscience. A presence without encounters.
G continued on her way, her arms crossed against herself. There was a kind of renunciation in her eyes, but also a new brilliance — as if what she hadn't found tonight had, in spite of everything, woken her up. Behind her, B was turning at the corner of an alley, his gaze raised for a moment to the sky.
They had not known that the moment had existed. But something had moved in them. Enough so that the silence is no longer quite the same.
The night and solitude
Night had settled quietly, enveloping the city in a haze of diffuse lights. G had been home for a while now, but nothing could fix her. His notebook remained open on the desk, blank, despite the hours spent waiting for the words to come. She stood motionless for a moment in front of the blank page, then wearily detached herself from it.
She walked slowly to the window. There, she leaned against the ledge, her arms crossed, looking at the trembling reflections of the street lamps on the still wet asphalt. The silence, which she had thought salutary, thickened around her, like a dense matter, impossible to pierce. Rather than illuminating it, it now seemed to swallow it up.
Everything about her had the feeling of a dream—the day had passed as if it hadn't really happened, and yet a strangeness remained. Something had moved inside her, without her knowing what to name. An absence inhabited him, deaf, persistent. An invisible imprint left by a look that she could no longer grasp.
She moved away from the window, grabbed a pencil and swirled it between her fingers. She wanted to trace what she had thought she saw in his eyes—that indefinite shade, that soft shadow. But his hand remained suspended. The line did not come. The image was already fading, slippery, unreal.
A doubt crossed her. What if all this had been just a projection, an invention of the mind to fill a gap that was too old? Yet, even illusions can leave scars. The latter, in any case, left a new sensation in her. Not a vacuum. A crack. And in this crack, a faint, flickering light... but there.
She returned to her seat in silence, but did not close the notebook. The rain had stopped, but the air, saturated with moisture, retained the echo of what it had washed. Outside, the city shone with a murky glow. Inside, G felt that something had begun to be born within her.
"How many others walk in this night with their hearts split by an almost? Maybe he's there, somewhere, looking at the same sky. "I would like to believe that we share this silence. Let our solitudes respond to each other. The world is too big. And yet, I feel it close. It's absurd, but that's how I feel."
B, for his part, had sat down near his window, his gaze lost in the night. The silent apartment seemed to weigh on him, but he had not the strength to break the silence.
"I can't sleep. My body is tired, but my mind is awake. It's still there, in my thoughts. Like a never-ending question." – "I would have liked to talk to him. Say something. But what? That I recognized his pain? I feel ridiculous. It was only a moment. A coincidence. "But then why does everything in me keep coming back to her? There is a form of connection that I don't understand. Maybe I don't need to understand." – "Maybe tonight, in this silence, she's thinking of me too."
He leaned against the back of the chair, closed his eyes. And in this peaceful darkness, a face appears. That of a woman he had never known, but from whom he could no longer detach himself.
The discreet ticking of the kitchen clock accompanied him in the darkness. Every second sounded like proof that he was still there, motionless, while the rest of the world slowly moved away. He closed his eyes for a moment, hoping to find that look back in his memories.
Suddenly, a popping sound broke out in the entrance—a fallen object, or perhaps a draught that had slammed the door shut. He jumped, jumped up, his heart pounding. The chair scraped the floor behind him. With a quick gesture, he turned on the light in the corridor.
Nothing. Silence had returned, but something had changed. He was no longer a prisoner of his thoughts—he had become present again, there, in his body, in this place.
He stood for a moment, then walked to the door. A sudden urge seized him: to go out. Breathe in the night air. To see if the city, too, was still watching.