Chapter 17 Of Remembrance
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
OF REMEMbrANCE
There comes a moment—quiet, almost unremarkable—when you try to remember something good, and find you cannot.
Not because it’s buried, but because it’s gone.
You reach back for warmth, for laughter, for light, and your hands come back empty. No gentle voices, no sunlit rooms. No scent of bread on a childhood morning, no echo of your name said with love.
Just absence.
Just the terrible, echoing silence where happiness once lived.
You think: there must have been something.
Surely there was a time when your heart beat for more than survival, when your smile wasn’t something you had to invent. But the pictures in your mind are dim now, washed in gray, like oil paintings left out in the rain.
You try harder.
You beg the dark for a single scrap—a laugh, a face, even a feeling. But the past has turned its back. And in its place is a blank space so wide, so deep, it feels like falling.
You begin to wonder if you ever had a happy memory at all. Or if you only dreamed them once, in a version of yourself that died quietly, unnoticed.
Eventually, you stop searching. Not out of acceptance, but exhaustion.
There is nothing left to find.
The good has been swallowed whole, and even the ache of missing it has begun to fade. All that remains is the dark, and the slow, cold understanding that you are no longer someone who remembers happiness.
Only someone who remembers trying to remember.
And that, somehow, is worse.