Chapter 1
Chapter One: The Beginning
He stood alone under the overcast sky, leaning against a cold stone wall. He looked up in silence, as if searching among the clouds for an answer. A question that had haunted him for years:
“Why can’t everyone live the way they want?”
His childhood wasn’t entirely bad, but he always knew there was something mysterious behind the simple life he had. He loved his mother deeply, but she was always busy, as if carrying a burden he couldn’t understand. As for his father, he was a man of few words, with a silent demeanor that hid what lay beneath.
He remembered that day well, not because it was tragic, but because it was different.
He came home early after an ordinary school day. He opened the door carefully, as if afraid to disturb something he couldn’t see. The house was quiet, unusually so. There were no familiar cooking smells, no sound of the television left on all day.
He walked toward the living room, where he found his father sitting alone. On the table in front of him, there was a small open box, revealing old papers and a black-and-white photo.
The child tried to ask, “What’s this, Dad?” but hesitated. There was something in his father’s gaze that made him pull back. It seemed as if the man had entered another world, a world of memories never shared with anyone.
In that moment, the child felt something strange. It wasn’t sadness, but a mysterious feeling of distance, as if there was a part of his father’s life hidden from him, a part that could never be understood.
The child quietly withdrew to his room and sat on his bed, staring at the ceiling. For the first time, he felt that adults lived lives far more complicated than he had imagined. He didn’t know what was in the box, and he never asked his father about it again. But in that moment, he learned a lesson that would stay with him forever:
“There are always secrets left unsaid, and there’s always something we don’t understand.”
He grew older, and with age, that feeling grew with him. Life was never as he thought it would be when he was young. It wasn’t filled with safety and simplicity. He now understood that the world was a complicated place, and that everyone, no matter how strong they appeared, carried with them closed boxes that would never open.
He looked up at the sky again, as if it were a mirror reflecting his own soul. This time, he asked clearly, as if speaking directly to the universe:
“Will I ever be able to understand all of this? Or, like them, will I remain a stranger even to myself?”
