I kept walking. Not out of will, not out of desire for movement or conviction that an elsewhere was waiting for me, but simply because there was no reason to remain still. Because stopping no longer had meaning, no longer had footing, no longer had use. My body moved forward with the same docility as breath, like a slow animal fleeing nothing, but finding nowhere to rest.
There was no longer a real direction. No goal. Just this vague, almost mechanical necessity to keep moving in a world that opposed nothing. I walked because staying would have been the same — and in perfect indifference, a step always seems preferable to stillness.
The ground hadn't changed — still that soft, almost lukewarm texture, neither truly solid nor entirely unstable, like a world that accepts weight without ever resisting it. But my gait, it wavered. Something in the way I inhabited movement had given way.
