The Air Also Weighs

Chapter One

I'm running away... again.

I wake with a tired soul, as if I had spent the entire night crying and screaming-without shedding a single tear, without uttering a single word.

It's always the same nightmare.

Something... or someone... is chasing me.

I never manage to look back. Terror takes hold before I can, keeping me from seeing its face. I never know what it looks like, yet I can feel it getting closer... as if it already knows exactly where to find me.

Fear reaches me before my thoughts do.

I tell myself this isn't new. I've been here before.

And still, I run.

I run even when my legs can barely carry me, even when there isn't enough air in my lungs and every step feels like it might be the one that makes me fall.

I run as though stopping would mean returning to something I've already lived through... something buried so deeply that my mind refuses to remember it.

Then I wake.

But the relief never comes.

My body doesn't understand that it's over.

Because some things never really leave.

They only lose their name.

I stare at the ceiling.

Sleep stopped being rest a long time ago. Now it's simply another way of going back there.

I close my eyes and count the seconds.

Just to remind myself that I'm here. That I'm awake. That I'm back in reality.

Music plays in the background, drowning out the unbearable echo of silence.

For a moment, I find something resembling peace in it.

In songs that never ask me to explain what even I cannot name.

They simply stay.

Holding everything I carry.

Keeping that imagined presence at a distance.

It doesn't disappear. It doesn't leave.

It just moves far enough away for me to breathe without feeling like something inside me is about to break.

Outside, dawn begins to creep in.

The light enters without asking permission, as it always does.

And I'm still tired...

but at least my body still responds.

There's just one thing I still can't shake.

The feeling that even when I'm awake...

I'm still running from something.