Even though some time had passed, I still couldn't fully grasp what had happened. My mind kept trying to reject everything I had experienced; but my body was forced to accept even the most brutal details. To see so many corpses in a single day… and to know that three of them belonged to my family… every second I remained conscious, I felt something inside me tearing apart. My stomach tightened as if prodded, my shoulders trembled. And yet, from the outside, I looked calm—my emotions were trapped under my skin as if sealed inside a tense membrane.
At the end of the corridor, a few officers were whispering among themselves. One of them occasionally glanced at me, and each time our eyes met, he quickly looked away. I didn't know what they were discussing, but their faces held that indescribable unease of people who have no idea how to approach someone. Some of their expressions carried obvious pity; others held a kind of instinctive distance… as if they were wary that I might leap at them at the slightest wrong move.
Eventually, two officers walked toward me. I knew this would happen—after something like this, questioning was inevitable. Still, I felt an emptiness open inside me, as if my last support had been pulled away.
"Would you come with us?" they asked.
Their voices were neither harsh nor gentle. Just two people doing their job… They knew I was the only one left from my family. Which meant they needed to hear about everything—from the incident itself to the second event that happened today—from me.
As I walked to the interrogation room, I couldn't hear my own footsteps. It felt as though the ground was swallowing me, growing heavier with every movement I made. When I sat down, the walls closed in like curtains slowly drawing inward. One officer placed files on the table; several papers slid toward me. Seeing my family's photos, names, and times of death gathered in one place lodged in my throat like a stone.
"We know you've been through a lot today," one of the officers said. He tried to soften his voice, but his words still carried a metallic coldness. "We need a clear statement to understand what happened. Both the first incident… and the situation in the room where Darian was found."
I struggled to breathe. Air entered me but didn't reach my lungs.
I parted my lips to speak.
Only this sentence came out:
"I… don't understand how everything happened so fast."
And even that was only the smallest fragment of what I wanted to express.
Then I felt a strange tension in my mind. One part of me insisted I needed to recount what I remembered, while another part rejected it. There were two voices inside me: one trying to push the truth out, the other keeping it locked behind a closed door. Even my tongue felt heavy when I tried to move my lips.
And that's when I realized:
The memories I was seeing… not all of them belonged to me.
Some were truly mine. But mixed among them were other images, other perspectives—from places I had never been, from angles I had never possessed. It was as if every scene I had lived was recorded by dozens of eyes and all of it was being loaded into my mind at once. The real and someone else's viewpoint blended together, impossible to tell apart.
As the images multiplied, my breath constricted. My mind felt like it was burning.
Suddenly, I saw myself and Darian lying on the floor—from a perspective I had never seen. Then the image shifted: I was sitting in the internet café. The glow of the screen burned my eyes, and Darian's angry voice passed by me and struck my mind. I remembered that moment—but at the same time, it felt like I wasn't the one who had lived it. Someone else's emotions had bled into mine.
Then the screams… my family's screams.
But even as I remembered them, the voices drifted away, faces slid out of place, time tangled into itself. Everything was both real and unreal.
Some memories are sharp as knives; others are blurry like a dream. Mine weren't between the two—they were both. At the same time.
"Did I really live these things? Or is my brain rewriting them?" I wondered.
There was no answer.
One of the officers asked another question. I heard the words, but their meaning never reached me.
In that moment I understood:
When the real and the reconstructed blend together, I can't even choose which one I'm supposed to tell.
My tongue grew heavy. My throat tightened.
I just stared. At nothing.
There was a crowded room inside my mind—everyone speaking at once, and I couldn't silence any of them.
And then I realized:
There was no way out of that crowd.
At least… not then.