I don't know when the texture of the ground changed. I couldn't even say if there was a moment. Maybe it's me who didn't feel it coming. Maybe my feet, too busy surviving to warn me, stopped transmitting what they were treading, or my knees, worn from bearing the weight of a silence that no longer belongs to me, unlearned how to discern what truly supports them. Or maybe… I simply no longer listen to myself walking. I move forward without contact. Without feedback. My body, from carrying a silenced voice, a foreign breath, has forgotten that it too could be heard.
Maybe walking itself has become a reflex. A trance of forgetting. As if movement replaced presence, as if advancing was enough to simulate existence a little longer, even without truly inhabiting it.
But suddenly… a sound.
Not a noise. No. Not something that alerts, that bursts, that cuts.