I awoke before dawn, though "awoke" may be too generous a word for what occurred. There had been no sleep, only the slow drowning in half-formed images—faces without names, uniforms without men inside them, and streets that wound endlessly, as if the cobblestones themselves were conspiring to lead me away from any home I might have once had. My eyes had been closed, my body slack, yet my mind clutched every detail of the dark. When the first thin light pressed through the barracks shutters, I was already upright, already waiting for the day to demand something from me.
The others stirred with a kind of brutal discipline. Boots hit the floorboards, belts snapped, breath steamed in the cold air. I followed the ritual as if my limbs belonged to another. It was easier not to resist. Easier to let the tide of movement carry me outside, into the yard where the frost clung to every stone and beam, and the world looked as if it had been stripped of all color but grey.
The overseer's voice thundered orders. He might have been speaking in another language for all I cared. The words landed, I obeyed, but none of it pierced the fog I walked within. My place in the march was near the back, where eyes seldom lingered, where the forgotten shuffled together like shadows.
It was during this march that something shifted, something so slight I might have ignored it if not for the intensity with which it rooted itself in me. A child—yes, a child—stood in the alley we passed, her small hands clutching a broken doll. She was barefoot in the frost. She did not wave, did not smile, did not cry. Only stared. Stared straight at me, and I felt her gaze burn deeper than any overseer's whip. And in that moment, though the column moved forward, I lost all sense of them, of boots and breath and barked orders. I saw only her.
And it was then that I realized: my thoughts were no longer drifting outside me, narrated as though by some detached observer. No, they pressed now in my own voice, like a confession murmured in a locked room. I was no longer being described—I was speaking. To myself. To something greater. To you, perhaps.
I tell you this because from that moment on, the third voice—the one that had narrated my despair like a distant witness—was gone. Only I remained, only my tongue, my memory, my cursed reflections. I had no shelter from myself.
The child's stare followed me through the day's labors. My hands bled against stone and iron, yet her pale face hovered at the edge of sight. Was she a phantom? Was she sent to remind me that I was still visible to someone, even if the world had marked me useless? I cannot say. But I know her silence spoke louder than the overseer's shouting, louder than the men's coughing and cursing. She had fixed me in her eyes as though pinning a moth to a board.
By nightfall, my body sagged into the straw cot, but my mind burned with her image. I felt myself splitting in two: the one who performed the tasks of the day, and the one who stood beside that barefoot child, clutching a broken doll. I asked myself if perhaps I, too, was nothing but a broken doll—a shape moved about by others, incapable of voicing my own design.
The barracks slept. I lay awake, and the voice that now belongs to me whispered through the silence:
"I am not invisible. I am not gone. They may strip me of name and rank, they may brand me a vagrant, a thief, a criminal without worth, but I still walk, I still breathe. And if I still breathe, then I still suffer. And if I still suffer, then perhaps I still live. And if I still live—then what will I do with this living?"
I asked the dark for answers. It gave me none. Only the groans of weary men, the snoring, the endless scratching of vermin in the walls. Yet I felt within me the faintest ember of defiance. Not rebellion, not yet—that requires hope. I speak only of the refusal to vanish.
The next morning, the child was not there. The alley was empty, the frost untouched. Yet her absence was louder than her presence had been. Each street we crossed seemed haunted by her ghost. I longed to see her again, if only to prove I had not dreamt her. And in that longing, I understood something terrible: I was capable of attachment still. Capable of hunger—not the hunger of the stomach, but the hunger of recognition. I wanted to be seen. To be acknowledged, even if only by the stare of a child.
Do you see the cruelty of it? I, who had been declared useless, who had been erased in the ledgers of society, still longed for the smallest confirmation that I had not yet disappeared entirely. My longing was a wound, and it widened with every passing day.
They put us to work in the quarries. Stone after stone, block after block, as though we were reshaping the earth only to bury ourselves beneath it. I carried, I lifted, I sweated, I bled. But all the while I whispered to myself, whispering in the rhythm of the stones:
"I still. I still. I still."
The words became my mantra. At first they meant nothing but survival. I still breathe. I still move. But soon they began to twist, to gather weight. I still remember. I still curse. I still wait. And perhaps, perhaps, I still will act.
I write this now, though there is no paper, no ink. My writing is in the rhythm of my steps, in the scars on my palms, in the hunger in my belly. Every mark upon me is a sentence, every bruise a paragraph. And I know one day someone may read this body and understand the story I could not otherwise tell.
The overseers do not know that I speak to myself this way. If they did, they would beat it out of me. They cannot abide a man who carries within him a world they cannot touch. They want us hollow. They want us empty shells. But I am not hollow. Not yet.
At night, when the men groan and shift in their cots, I imagine I hear the child's voice. She has never spoken, yet in my dreams she whispers: *You are still.* I wake trembling, unable to decide if this voice is my salvation or my damnation. For to be still is to endure, but it is also to rot, unmoving, waiting for decay.
Do you understand? My crime was not theft, not truly. My crime was persistence. My crime was existing after they had decreed I should not. And so they call me criminal, vagrant, vermin. Yet in truth, I am only guilty of refusing disappearance.
The nights grow colder. Frost creeps into my bones. And yet I hold the words tighter than ever:
"I still."
It is not yet rebellion. It is not yet hope. But it is the seed of something that cannot be entirely erased.