Chapter 1 - Darkness
Chapter 1 – Darkness
Darkness… I am surrounded by pitch-black darkness.
I don’t know how I got here or when I arrived… It feels as though my body is enclosed within a shell. I have no idea what lies beyond it. Sometimes I feel myself swaying gently, as if something is carrying me back and forth. Then everything comes to a standstill, and I am left in a silence that seems to stretch into eternity. I don’t know how time passes here. Perhaps time has not yet begun for me.
I think I am in the very first place where a new life begins. I don’t know where this is, but I feel as though I am living through my earliest days. I remember nothing yet. I don’t even know whether I have a past. Perhaps there is not yet a past for me to remember.
A coolness seeps into my shell from the outside. It is a soft, damp chill that spreads everywhere.
I can feel something changing within me. My body is taking shape, as though touched by an invisible hand. I don’t yet know what I am. Once, I was nothing more than a tiny beginning; now, I am gradually becoming something of my own. I cannot understand how any of this is happening. All I know is that with every passing moment, I am changing a little more.
Who was that shadow that left me here? What was it thinking when it left me here? I wonder if it is still waiting for me. Perhaps it never gave me a thought. Perhaps it simply carried on, unaware of the beginning it had left behind. I feel as though I will never know it. I feel so terribly alone… Are some encounters destined to disappear before they ever take place?
None of us can choose our beginnings. Mine, however, began in a very small place: inside a shell, somewhere so confined that the slightest movement would bring me against its walls. How could someone born in such a tiny place possibly know which world they belong to? I suppose I will try to understand the life laid before me, and eventually come to believe that it is my world.
Perhaps living means trying to grow accustomed to a world we never chose.
The space I am in is beginning to feel too small. This little place, which once seemed sufficient, is turning into somewhere my body can no longer fit. The boundaries that once protected me now seem like an obstacle I must overcome. It is as though I was not meant to remain here, but to leave one day. I am preparing for somewhere I have yet to discover. Is it possible to long for a place one has never seen?
I can feel it.
I don’t know what lies outside. Perhaps light, perhaps an endless darkness. Perhaps a vast world inhabited by others like me. Will beautiful things await me, or will I have to struggle from the very first day? I don’t know.
There is only one thing I know: I have taken no steps yet. I have no past. Nothing I can call my own. All I have is a life waiting to begin.
I don’t know how vast the world outside is, or how little space I will occupy within it. One day, this darkness will come to an end. I will see the light. For the first time, I will come face to face with the world beyond. Perhaps I will be afraid, perhaps amazed. Perhaps I will not want to leave the place I came from.
But I know I will not remain here forever.
Then, beside me, a faint fracture. Not a sound, but a deep tremor that I feel with my entire being. Then another, farther away… Tiny cracks begin to spread through the darkness. It is as though, within this silence, life is awakening in more than one place.
