The Shape of What Slipped Away
He sat in the dirt long after the girl stopped speaking.
She wasn't gone.
Not exactly.
Just distant now.
Folded back into the edge of the scene, like a side character in a play waiting for her cue.
The wind touched the grass around him.
He didn't move.
His mind felt swollen.
Like a bruise behind his thoughts.
"I remembered something," he whispered.
Then again, quieter:
"I understood it."
And it was true.
For a moment—just a moment—it had all made sense.
Not just who he was, or where.
But everything.
The layers beneath memory.The shape of the lie he was living.The fact that there was a shape at all.
But then it vanished.
Slipped between his fingers like wet paper.
And now?
Now there was only the echo.
He pressed his hands into the soil.
Felt the earth beneath his nails.
There was something under there.
Not physically. Not quite.
A pressure. A shadow of something buried—not in the dirt, but in him.
"What was it?" he asked.
Not to the girl.
Not to anyone.
Just to the space between thoughts.
"Why does it feel like it mattered?"
The wind moved again.
But it didn't answer.
He closed his eyes.
Tried to retrace the moment.
The feeling of knowing.
The instant before it was gone.
And in that moment, his mind did something strange.
It reached for the memory.
And fell through it.
He saw fragments.
—A hand pressed against glass.—A dark room.—A voice calling a name he no longer recognized.—Something heavy.—Something being buried.
Then nothing.
Just white.
Then red.
Then silence.
He opened his eyes.
His hands were shaking.
He looked up at the sky again.
Still frozen.
Still false.
Still pretending.
"How much of this is real?" he asked aloud.
No one answered.
He stood.
And for a moment, he didn't feel like a person.
He felt like a shadow of an answer.
A thing built around a question.
He took one step forward.
The ground didn't move.
But the sky did.
Just slightly.
Just enough for him to notice.
Like it had blinked.