She woke up without knowing what kind of person she was supposed to be today.
The room was quiet, but her mind wasn’t.
There were thoughts—too many, unfinished, overlapping—like voices she couldn’t name anymore.
She pressed her hand to her chest, not to feel pain, but to check if she was still there inside it.
Still there.
That was the only answer she had.
Outside the window, life kept moving as if nothing inside her had stopped.
That confused her the most—how the world could continue so normally when she felt so paused.
She tried to remember what she wanted.
Not what she should want. Not what others needed from her.
Just… her own desire.
But it didn’t come.
Instead, a quieter question appeared:
“If I don’t know who I am right now… who was I before I got this tired?”
And for the first time in a long while, she didn’t rush to answer it.
She just sat there, letting the question exist.
She saw an unclear face of a man she had never met.
It wasn’t sharp, not real, almost like a memory from another world she didn’t belong to.
But something in it made her stop.
Not desire.
Not love.
Just… relief.
A quiet thought formed inside her, soft and dangerous at the same time—maybe safety looks like this.
Warm arms.
A place where she could finally stop being afraid.
A life where she didn’t have to fight every day just to exist.
She didn’t know him. She didn’t even know if he was real.
But in her mind, he became a bridge—something she built carefully over the emptiness inside her, just so she could walk away from the weight of this world without falling.
To others, it might look like illusion.
Maybe even madness.
But to her, it was the only way she knew how to keep going.
Because even after everything she had endured…
she still wanted to live.
