no one
In the corner of a cold, desolate cell—where the walls knew only the shadows of eternal night—Youssef sat curled into himself, as if he were part of the earth. Not a living, breathing body, but a ghost born of regret and solitude. The walls dripped with darkness; dampness crept across his skin like spectral fingers. The air was heavy, still, as if suffocated by a silence that had lasted twenty-five years.
There was no day, no night. Time had melted Into the shadows, measured not by hours but by fractured breaths and recurring nightmares that embraced him whenever he closed his eyes—like a starving mother mourning her lost children, whispering to him in voices so painfully familiar.
Youssef touched the walls with reverence, his trembling hand brushing against the stone as though searching for remnants of a self that once existed there—some trace that proved he had once been a human being, not just a number among prison walls, not merely the echo of a silenced tale.
Each evening was a ritual of madness and clinging. He would retell himself the same story in a hushed voice, like a sacred chant.
"Everything began with love,” he whispered, his tone quivering like an old string bleeding a faded melody. His eyes—blue, sometimes navy—were filled with a sorrow too deep to measure, fixed on a faint patch of light that slipped through a tiny crack in the wall, as If searching for an invisible salvation.
Then he continued, In a fractured voice:
"But love… love itself turned Into a curse.”
Adam.
A name that, when spoken, made Youssef tremble, freezing the blood in his veins. A man who once lived for a noble cause—yes. But when nobility Is tainted by madness, it becomes a monster devoid of mercy. When Illness began to ravage his wife’s body, Adam’s life centered on a single Idea: rejection.
Rejecting death.
Rejecting fate.
He believed in only one thing: that Youssef’s heart—the pure-hearted young man—might save her.
Youssef raised a shaking hand to his chest, touching the spot over his heart, as if to confirm it was still there, still beating despite everything.
That night, in a narrow alley between two slumbering neighborhoods forgotten by the world, Youssef—still not twenty—was returning from his evening job, carrying warm bread and soup barely holding onto Its heat. All he wanted was to return to his ailing mother, her mind slowly unraveling in the depths of Alzheimer’s, waiting for him each night with lost eyes and a fadIng smile.
No one saw him being taken.
No one heard his cry when his mouth was covered and he was shoved into a black car, unmarked—as if it had come from nowhere.
He woke In a cold, damp room. Blindfolded. Hands bound. The first thing he heard was Adam’s voice—calm, yet cold as frost.
"I’m sorry, Youssef… I truly am.”
Youssef screamed. Cried. His voice tore between pleading and terror. But no one answered.
Adam approached, plunged a needle Into his arm, injecting a cold liquid that spread through his veins like a silent fire.
"I won’t kill you… If you cooperate. I only need your heart. She deserves life more than you.”
The fear was beyond endurance. Time shattered. Youssef doesn’t remember all the details—only the blood. The warmth of the blood. The body of the man who wanted to steal his soul, lying still before him.
He ran. Ran until his feet broke—but he didn’t escape the nightmare. He was no longer free, haunted by unseen phantoms and an Inner voice that accused him without mercy.
Then came the final blow.
Within weeks, his name filled headlines:
"Youssef F., the serial killer. Mentally unstable. A heartless monster.”
The media painted a face he didn’t recognize. He became the victim of a story he didn’t write.
No one heard his side. No one defended him. Not even he could muster the strength to try. He obeyed every word said, believed the accusations, surrendered to a verdict in which his only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Twenty-five years passed.
Youssef didn’t live. He crumbled, piece by piece.
Every night he saw Adam.
He heard his mother In her final moments.
He heard the laughter of journalists.
He saw his own face In the mirror, twisted by time into someone he no longer knew.
And one night, he cried. Not the cry of a broken man.
Not of a lost child.
But a cry that felt like the very walls sobbed through him,
As if the moon behind the bars had finally shattered.
He whispered, barely audible:
"Why did I forget who I am? Why did my mother forget me? Why did he forget me?”
Then he screamed. Screamed until his throat tore, until blood flowed from his mouth instead of voIce.
No one came.
Then he spoke, hoarse, almost unrecognizable:
"They said I was Ill. They named It ‘the mask.’ And I… I believed them. I believed their nonsense—me, who once was gentle, kind… full of love.”
He paused and swallowed a bitter sigh.
"How cruel life Is, when reality dreams of dreams…
And dreams have nothing left but to reflect reality’s bitterness.
People flee to dreams—only to find their nightmares waiting.
And if dreams were truly a refuge,
Humanity would sleep from the deserts of Arabia to the last mountain in the lands of the strangers.”
He fell silent for a moment.
Then wished, like a child wishing for the Impossible:
"If only I could dream.
Just… to find happiness there.
To love there.
Even my killer—the one I wanted to kill before he killed me—
Just to see him one last time… In a dream.”
And that night, Youssef did not sleep.
He collapsed—silently.
Until nothing remained of him but a trembling mask, In a forgotten cell,
Untouched by spirits, untouched by mercy.
When the prison doctor ordered him to write therapeutic journals, he thought they would be nothing more than ink on paper.
But as he began to write, he found them to be a mirror—
Revealing his depths, exposing his wounds, laying bare what remained of his mind.
No one knew that those journals…
Were the last voice he had before they moved him to the new place.
In solitary confinement, Youssef had only his own voice—sometimes whispering, sometimes screaming—scolding him one moment, comforting him the next. Isolation became a prison without keys: grey walls slowly devouring time, and an iron door that opened only to deliver a cold plate of tasteless, scentless food—
As if life Itself had abandoned the cell.
In this forsaken corner of the world, his memory began to rot in silence,
Like fruit left at the bottom of a box until It decayed.
He forgot the faces that once smiled at him,
The voices that once called his name,
Even the names that once filled his heart with warmth… disappeared.
Many doctors came and went—like ghosts without features, without trace.
He began to doubt whether they had ever been real,
Or were simply figments of the “mask” that now lived in his mind—
Feeding on what was left of his soul.
And yet, one memory resisted decay.
One remained lodged deep within, like a splinter that could not be pulled: Sarah.
He didn’t know why hers was the only image that endured.
Maybe because she was the only one who hadn’t asked him about the crime—
She asked about the pain.
She didn’t see him as a monster, but as a human.
Her gaze was gentle, carrying a tenderness unlike the cold sterility of hospitals.
When he spoke, she listened—not to analyze or to record,
But to understand..
In one of his fits of rage, when he smashed everything in his cell, the guards stormed in like a hurricane—masked, merciless—and dragged him to a cell even darker, even more desolate. Before the door shut, he glimpsed a face behind the glass. He couldn’t be sure it was her… but his heart, despite all its ruin, whispered: it’s Sarah.
In his diary, he wrote:
“Everyone disappeared. Everyone faded into the fog of forgetfulness. Except her. I don’t know if she’s real… or just a fabrication of the Mask. Sometimes, in the stillness of night, I hear her voice say: ‘Yousef, don’t let the darkness swallow you.’ But I’m tired… and the dark is kinder than mirrors.”
On the next page, he wrote a single sentence:
“If Sarah is still reading, then I am still breathing.”
Then the voices multiplied… no longer whispers, but an internal cacophony. The voice of his mother, when she was lucid. The voice of his childhood, screaming in hunger and fear. The voice of pain… the voice of the corpse. One sentence echoed in his ears again and again: “Someone like her deserved to live more than you.”
He sat curled in the corner like a frightened fetus, staring at the wall as if waiting for it to split open and swallow him. Inside him, a war was raging.
A faint voice whispered:
“You are a victim, Yousef. It wasn’t your fault. Everything was just chance. Your release is near… don’t give up.”
A second voice, mocking and cruel, responded:
“A victim? No. You’re a killer. You tasted blood… and you liked it.”
Yousef laughed—a trembling laugh, closer to the gasp of a child waking from a nightmare. He covered his face with his hands and murmured:
“I was just trying to live… I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want to become the monster.”
Suddenly, he stood and began scratching the wall with his broken nails, writing in his own blood:
“The monster is the one who sees your heart and deems it worthy of slaughter.”
Then he sat down again, whispering to himself:
“I used to write because Sarah wanted me to write. Now I write to remember I was once human. Are these memoirs? Or a madness manifesto? The Mask told me last night I no longer need a face… said faces are a burden to killers. So I’ve decided… I’ll erase mine.”
Then, in a voice as faint as if the walls were eavesdropping:
“But Sarah used to see my face… she was the only one who looked at my eyes, not my hands. She told me: ‘You’re still there, under the rubble.’ But she was wrong. I’m no longer here… I am the Mask.”
The nights stretched endlessly, as if time itself were dying. The days came dim and shy, as if the sun refused to light his cell. He gradually lost his features, his identity dissolving in a night without dawn. On the walls, he scribbled names he no longer remembered, dates he forgot, fragments that seemed like echoes of other souls:
“I am Yousef… or the name my mother gave me.”
“Sarah, don’t read this if you want to keep a kind image of me.”
“The Mask doesn’t sleep… the Mask waits.”
One evening, as the solitude strangled him like a thick rope, a piece of paper slipped under the cell door. It wasn’t a formal notice—it was a short message, written in delicate script:
“May I come in? —S.”
His heart trembled. The paper was like the first drop of rain after a merciless summer. The iron door opened with a faint creak, as if apologizing for disturbing his solitude. Yousef lifted his head slowly, like a man waking from a heavy dream.
But it wasn’t Sarah who entered.
It was a man in his late fifties, worn features like someone bearing the sorrow of an entire city. His eyes were sunken, but steady. He squatted at a safe distance and said:
“Yousef, I’m Dr. Salim. I’ve been assigned to oversee your case.”
Yousef didn’t respond. He only stared silently, his eyes empty like a barren desert.
The doctor continued:
“They told me you don’t speak much, but you write—on the walls, on paper, even on your own hands sometimes. Is that true?”
Yousef nodded and pointed to his chest:
“They don’t hear. I write to stay balanced… to fight the Mask.”
The doctor opened a small notebook and jotted something down.
He said gently:
“I’ve read some of your old diaries—the ones Dr. Rola asked you to write. There’s painful honesty in them… and there’s Sarah.”
At the mention of her name, Yousef flinched slightly, as if a long-healed wound had begun bleeding again.
The doctor said:
“Sarah didn’t completely vanish. She’s now working in the psychological research unit. She asked about you. But she doesn’t have clearance to visit.”
A heavy silence fell.
Then the doctor pulled out a blank page and placed it in front of him:
“Write to her. No conditions. Every letter you write is a step toward healing.”
Yousef looked at the page like a drowning man looks at a floating plank. He took it and asked:
“Will you read it?”
The doctor answered:
“What matters is that you write it. I’ll try to get it to her.”
“What if I write something unforgivable?”
The doctor replied:
“Forgiveness isn’t our task. But silence kills.”
And before leaving, he whispered:
“The Mask might fall with a single word.”
Yousef sat before the page, holding the pen like a blade, and wrote:
“To Sarah, who might be an illusion… or the only salvation.”
The next day, the doctor returned. The paper was still blank.
Yousef said:
“I didn’t write. I don’t want to write about her.”
The doctor replied:
“Write whatever you want.”
Yousef responded:
“Then I choose not to write about her.”
The doctor smiled and sat beside him:
“That’s fine. Let’s write about you, your body, the Mask. No emotions. Just the condition.”
He handed him a leather-bound journal and said:
“One page a day. No love or hate. Just you, as you see yourself.”
Yousef asked:
“You want me to bury my heart?”
The doctor replied:
“I want you to free your body from the burden of the heart, so it can heal. And I’ll tell you this, Yousef… if you help me, I promise you’ll see Sarah again. That’s a promise.”
Yousef lifted his eyes and said in a hoarse voice:
“And if the treatment fails… I’ll hang myself.”
The doctor paused, then nodded:
“Write… and find out who I am.”
And he left, leaving Yousef alone—with a notebook, a pen, and a narrow window of hope.
