I know something is missing because the room feels wrong.
It is not messy. Everything is exactly where it should be the table, the lamp, the thin stack of paper I am not allowed to fill, the book I am not allowed to finish reading. Even the chair remembers its shape.
I do not.
There is a gap where certainty should exist. Not a thought, but something heavier. A weight that once pressed inside my chest and is gone now, leaving only the echo of pressure.
I sit very still. Movement sometimes dislodges things that are trying to remain.
The rules are written nowhere, but we learn them early.If a thought resists being held, you do not chase it.If a memory recoils, you let it go.Clarity is an injury. Persistence makes it fatal.
I place my hand on the table to anchor myself. The wood is scarred with old, shallow marks cuts that were started and abandoned. People once carved names into surfaces. That practice ended before my apprenticeship.
My name is Tej.
I am a Historian.
The title is safer than the work. Titles are allowed because they do not explain themselves. The work does.
I am meant to preserve the past without completing it.
On the table lies the record of last night's event. Not written assembled. A small arrangement of objects placed close together, suggesting sequence without explanation. A cracked lens. A length of wire burned black at one end. A strip of cloth folded too carefully to be accidental.
A person was involved. I know this because the arrangement bends inward, the way events do when they circle a life.
I do not know who.
That absence is new.
I close my eyes not to remember, never that but to measure the damage. Loss has a shape. It pulls tension into nearby thoughts. A memory taken cleanly leaves balance behind.
This one did not.
Something was removed in a hurry.
I reach for the permitted tools. A charcoal stick. A thin sheet of fiber that will tear if I press too hard. I begin to draw the objects exactly as they are. Representation is tolerated. Interpretation is not.
Halfway through the lens, my hand stops.
A name rises behind my teeth.
I do not speak it.
The room tightens as coherence approaches. The lamp flickers not as a warning, but as recognition. Reality notices patterns quickly. It does not like them.
I breathe slowly until the pressure fades.
When I look down again, the drawing is complete.
Something else is missing.
It takes a moment to understand what it is.
The title of my position no longer feels familiar.
I sit alone with the objects, the quiet, and the growing certainty that this loss is different.
This one is not contained.
This one has direction.
And whatever was taken from me knows exactly where I work.
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