My earliest memory is not of my mother's face.
It is of a wall.
A pale blue wall in a rented house, cracked like dry skin, with a thin black line running through it. Every afternoon, when the sun leaned just right, the line looked like it was moving—slowly crawling upward, as if the wall itself was alive and trying to escape.
I used to stare at it for hours.
Sometimes I blinked, and the crack was longer.
Sometimes shorter.
Once, it was gone entirely.
That was the first time I learned not to tell adults everything.
I was six years old then. Maybe seven. My age was never stable in my head, like dates written in pencil and erased too many times.
Our house stood at the edge of a small town where trains passed but never stopped. The tracks were close enough that the ground trembled when one rushed by, close enough that my heart learned to beat in rhythm with metal and distance.
My father said trains were proof that the world moved forward.
My mother said they were proof that people were always leaving.
I believed both.
On my seventh birthday—at least, the birthday everyone agreed was my seventh—I woke up to silence. Not the comfortable morning silence, but the kind that presses on your ears until you notice it.
No birds.
No train.
No neighbor shouting.
I walked into the living room and saw my parents sitting on the sofa, staring at nothing.
"Ma?" I asked.
She turned her head slowly, like a clock hand pushed by a tired finger. Her eyes focused on me, then slid past, then returned.
"Oh," she said, smiling too late. "You're here."
"I was always here."
She laughed softly, as if I had made a joke, but I hadn't.
My father stood up. Or maybe he was already standing—I don't remember him rising, only that suddenly he was tall and blocking the light.
"Go wash your face," he said. "You're late for school."
"I don't have school today."
He frowned. Not angry. Confused.
"Of course you do."
That day happened twice.
I know because I lived it twice.
The first time, I slipped on the wet steps outside and scraped my knee. The blood was bright, shocking, real. My mother cleaned it, scolding me gently. I cried. I remember the exact pattern on the floor tiles.
The second time, the steps were dry.
I still touched my knee, expecting pain.
There was none.
I looked down. No wound. No scar. Just smooth skin, as if the fall had been a story someone changed their mind about.
At school, my teacher called attendance. When she reached my name, she hesitated.
"You were absent yesterday," she said.
"No, I wasn't."
She tilted her head. "You were. I remember."
I remembered too.
Both versions.
That night, I started my first diary.
It wasn't planned. I didn't think of it as important. It was an old notebook my cousin left behind, half-filled with math problems. I tore out the used pages and began writing from the back, because starting at the front felt too official.
Today happened again, I wrote, my handwriting uneven.
I think time made a mistake.
The crack on the wall grew longer.
Or maybe I noticed it more.
Childhood passed in fragments rather than years. Some days stretched endlessly—summer afternoons where the sun refused to move. Other times, weeks vanished between blinks.
I would go to sleep on a Tuesday and wake up on a Friday, my mother saying, "You slept a lot," as if that explained everything.
Once, during a wedding, I saw my grandmother standing near the well outside. She had died the previous winter. I knew that. I had seen the body, wrapped in white, disappearing into earth.
But there she was, smiling, waving at me.
When I ran toward her, someone grabbed my arm.
"Who are you running to?" my aunt asked.
I looked back.
The well was empty.
That night, my diary had a new sentence I didn't remember writing:
Some people visit early.
I tried to stop writing after that.
But the diary didn't stop.
Pages filled themselves in uneven ink. Sometimes events appeared before they happened. Sometimes they crossed themselves out, thick black lines tearing through moments I still remembered clearly.
My parents began to argue more. About money. About my silence. About why I stared at nothing and flinched at empty corners.
One evening, my father sat beside me on the bed.
"You don't play much," he said carefully. "Kids your age should be louder."
"I'm listening," I replied.
"To what?"
I opened my mouth.
Then closed it.
How do you explain the sound of seconds folding in on themselves? How do you explain that sometimes the air feels heavy, like it remembers something you don't?
"I don't know," I said.
He sighed and ruffled my hair. His hand paused for just a moment too long, as if he was memorizing the weight of my head.
That night, the train passed again. Louder than usual.
I dreamed I was old.
Not tall-old. Not strong-old. Bent, tired-old. Sitting on a wooden chair, hands spotted and trembling, holding a thick book with a familiar cover.
A diary.
I was reading aloud to someone I couldn't see.
"And that's when it first began," the old me said. "The slipping. The skipping. I didn't know then that childhood was only the opening paragraph."
I woke up screaming.
My mother rushed in, holding me so tightly it hurt.
"You're safe," she whispered. "You're here. You're just a child."
But her voice shook.
In the morning, the crack on the wall reached the ceiling.
I opened my diary for comfort.
A new entry waited for me.
Chapter One ends here.
Next, you will learn how to pretend everything is normal.
I closed the book.
Outside, the train tracks hummed.
And for the first time, I felt certain of something—
Life was not moving forward.
It was circling.
Quietly.
Patiently.