I believed, for a moment, that silence would be enough to shelter me. That sitting there, within the porosity of a breath that had become almost slow, almost disembodied, would be enough to erase my form — or at least blur it just enough to no longer truly exist, for the world to stop holding me by the shoulders, or for me simply to stop holding myself within it. I still believed that the erasure would come from outside, that silence, if it pressed close enough to me, if it clung to my folds like a blind balm, would end up silencing also that which, within me, still trembled without daring to name itself. But very quickly… something stopped me.
Not a sound. Not a shape. Nothing visible. Nothing conscious.
Something prior to contact. Something older than the gaze. A naked perception, raw, embedded in the weave of reality, a sensation of already being seen, even before having moved, before even thinking I needed to hide. And that something… was watching.
