Chapter One: What Was Written Instead of Speech
I did not begin this record because I wanted to remember,
but because silence began to leave a written trace on things.
At first, I thought it was merely a habit.
To write instead of speaking.
To let sentences end on paper rather than shatter in the air.
But the record was not an ordinary notebook.
It filled itself without my noticing,
as if I were not writing down what I knew,
but what I was avoiding.
I do not remember when I decided to call it a record.
The word came late, after I began returning to it as though returning to a place I knew better than I knew myself.
Every page began as if it were a continuation of a page I had never written.
I would open the notebook,
stare for a moment,
then write a sentence that did not complete itself.
And close it.
The city is quiet in a way that does not reassure.
It is not the quiet of dawn,
nor the quiet of abandoned places.
It is the quiet of someone who knows more than they say.
People here do not stare for long.
Nor do they ask clear questions.
As if they learned early on that certain kinds of curiosity are unforgivable.
And when I pass among them,
I sometimes feel that silence moves ahead of me.
There is a door in my apartment that I do not remember when it was last closed.
It is not completely shut,
nor open enough.
A narrow gap, the size of a doubt.
I did not try to open it.
And I did not try to close it.
I told myself that doors mean nothing,
yet I passed by it cautiously,
as though I feared it might hear me.
On the night I wrote the first page,
I stopped at a single sentence:
There is something I know… but do not possess.
I did not know what I meant by it.
Nor did I try to know.
I closed the record
and placed it in the lower drawer,
where the things we postpone without a convincing reason accumulate.
The next day,
a man in the street asked me whether I had slept well.
An ordinary question.
But his manner was not.
He looked at me as if the answer did not matter,
as if the question were merely a signal.
I replied with a brief nod
and walked on.
As I moved away,
I heard him say in a low voice:
"So you are still avoiding it."
I did not turn around.
Not because I had not heard,
but because I had heard more than I should have.
I began to notice small things.
Details that cannot be grasped,
yet repeat themselves insistently.
The clock in the kitchen is always two minutes slow.
The mirror in the bathroom does not reflect me immediately.
And the record…
it would open to pages I did not remember writing.
They were not clear sentences,
but attempts.
Beginnings,
and sudden interruptions.
As if someone were writing about me
and then retreating at the last moment.
One day I tried to speak.
To say something complete,
clear,
leaving no room for interpretation.
But the words stopped in my throat
not out of fear…
but as if they could not find a safe place to be spoken.
In that moment,
I felt something like relief.
And that is what frightened me.
Silence here is not the absence of sound.
It is a decision.
Anyone who has made it once
knows that they do not return as they were.
In the evening,
I sat before the record for a long time without opening it.
I felt that the next page would demand more than I could offer.
And when I finally opened it,
I found a single sentence in the middle of the page:
This is not a confession.
I stared at it for a long time.
Then I added beneath it, without thinking:
But it is the closest thing to one.
I closed the notebook slowly.
I felt neither guilt
nor relief.
I felt only that the emptiness
was no longer endless.
And that I,
in some way,
had begun to count its boundaries.
End of Chapter One
I hope you like the first chapter☺️💗