Chapter 1 - At the end of the account, only I remain
He did not understand the dark path that had deposited him there. A clear break with the day before, a blurred amnesia like a bad dream.
Yesterday, the wet and cold planks of a bridge were his only refuge. The acrid smell of the river and the constant whispers of the sleeping city rocked his precarious nights.
Today, the relentless sunburn on his bare skin was the only reality. He walked an infinite desert, each step raising a cloud of fine sand that infiltrated everywhere. The rough texture under his feet recalled a rough and endless tongue.
Nu. An uncomfortable nudity, almost obscene under this strange sky.
The clothes torn barefoot somewhere in this black hole in his memory, he missed sorely. The ones he wore now were a second dirt skin: sweat dried in salty plates, sand sticky like gangrene, dark traces that could be ancient blood - or the viscous ghosts of repressed memories. He was no longer looking for the origin. His mind, tired of so many unsolved enigmas, had resigned himself to ignorance.
Ken was seventeen, the age of hopes and promises.
However, his reflection in the invisible mirror of the sand only returned a worn, prematurely old image. He was too small for his age, his thin bones drawing a fragile silhouette under the raw light. Too thin, its ribs protruding like the bars of an empty cage. Too silent, his movements slow and measured, imprinted with instinctive caution.
His hair, of an ink black, matte and rough, did not capture any patch of light. They hung lifeless on his forehead, shading an emaciated face.
His eyes were the real abyss. Two dark orbits, a bottomless abyss where all emotion seemed to have drowned. No anger, this incandescent ember that sometimes animates the most desperate. Don't be afraid, this primitive alert that keeps you alife. Just... a sidereal void, a cold nothingness that sucked light and sound.
An abyss of terrifying calm. We could have dived into it without ever reaching the bottom.
—
Before this arid and ruthless world, there was the other. A blurred memory, tinged with greys and regrets.
The one who was called "the real one". Ironically. The one where he was born, a tiny and insignificant point on an indifferent planet. The one who had ignored him with relentless constancy.
Ken had no father. An abstract word, an empty box checked by default on administrative forms. Or rather: he had only an empty word instead, sometimes whispered by his mother with a mixture of shame and sadness.
His mother. Young, the sweet face framed by rebellious locks, perpetually confused in the meanders of a life too heavy for her fragile shoulders. She loved him, in her disorderly and imperfect way. It was a fragile certainty to which he still sometimes clung, in the darkest corners of his memory.
Then she was dead, carried away by a disease as banal as it was relentless. He was four years old, an age when the world is still made of bright colours and careless laughter. His death had tarnished everything.
Since then, he had grown like a stain of moisture on a withered wall, an ignored presence that no one bothered to clean, that no one really noticed. He had learned the hunger that rumbles the bowels, the icy bite of the rain on his skin, the promiscuity and violence of the impersonal foster homes, the bitter taste of lies and broken promises, the endless nights populated by silent nightmares, the fleeing glances of the hurried people who passed by without ever seeing him.
He had known bits of affection, furtive gestures of tenderness quickly extinguished. He had also learned to be wary, to erect invisible walls around his heart.
He had loved, awkwardly, briefly, ephemeral friendships swept by the wind of fate.
He had hated, in silence, this indifference of the world, this ordinary cruelty that crushes the weakest.
He had dreamed, especially at night, of illusory escapes, of better worlds where his place would exist.
He had fallen, over and over again, getting up each time with the desperate tenacity of those who have nothing to lose.
He had survived. A simple observation, without glory or pride.
And one day — he had woken up here. With no memory of the transition. For no apparent reason. Without the slightest bit of explanation. A new absurd chapter opened in his already chaotic existence.
And you know what? A small bitter sneer stretched his chapped lips.
He didn't care.
Because by dint of living in a world that had no meaning, where logic and justice seemed abstract concepts,
Changing the world did not fundamentally change anything to his state. The absurdity remained the same, only the decor differed.
—
He continued to walk. The sun, ruthless, was a blade of fire planted in his neck. The heat radiated from the ground, rising in invisible waves that deformed the distant. His feet burned on the burning sand, but he had learned to ignore the pain, to relegate it to the background.
No one came to meet him. In this desolate expanse, he was the only soul in motion.
No one was waiting for him. The very idea of an expectation, of a hope in something or someone, seemed strangely foreign to him.
But he continued. An obscure and tenacious force pushed him forward, a survival inertia deeply rooted in him.
Because he had a sentence. Only one, engraved in the depths of his being.
The only thing he had never really lost, the only constant landmark in the maelström of his existence.
At the end of the account, only me remains.
He did not whisper it as an incantation to reassure himself. Words had never had much power over his reality.
He did not utter it to give himself a capacity, to make illusions about his vulnerability.
He said it... because it was the raw truth, the only immutable law he had learned.
When a lonely tear, burning like acid, sometimes managed to escape, he whispered to it, the salty taste on his lips confirming the loneliness of his grief.
When a brief flash of joy, a fragile and unexpected spark, crossed his mind, he breathed it like a precious secret, aware of its ephemeral nature.
When fatigue knocked him down, when his legs faltered under the effort, he thought of it, like a stubborn mantra to get up.
When doubt assaulted him, this insidious little voice that questioned everything, he anchored himself there, like a lifebuoy in an ocean of confusion.
Not because she was beautiful, melodious or inspiring. Beautiful words were often the most misleading.
But because she stood, solid and unshakeable, even when everything else collapsed around him.
—
Ken did not seek to flee from others, at least more actively. He had passed this stage. Loneliness had become an old companion, familiar and predictable.
He had already had friends, makeshift allies crossed on his bumpy path. Fleeting figures that left behind a mixture of good memories and bitter disappointments.
They had already helped him, out of kindness, interest or simple chance. Saved, even, from desperate situations.
But over time, a simple, brutal and irrefutable truth had imposed itself on him, as a painful evidence:
Whatever your entourage, no matter how loving and benevolent it is, whatever your physical or moral strength, no matter how impressive it is, whatever your dream, no matter how big and inspiring it is... you die alone.
Not alone by abandonment, not necessarily. But of a deeper, more intrinsic loneliness.
Alone because no one, even the closest one, could penetrate the complex labyrinths of your thoughts and emotions. No one could really think of your place.
No one could feel the throbbing pain, the exuberant joy, the tenacious doubt, exactly as you felt them. No one could feel, in your place.
No one could make the crucial decisions, those that shape your life, in your place. No one could choose, in your place.
In the end... even the purest, most devoted love could not cross this ultimate barrier. He stopped at the threshold of death, unable to accompany you into the afterlife.
So he had kept this sentence, not as a cold and defensive wall to protect himself from the world,
But like a small cold, but reliable lamp, which projected a faint glow in the darkness of its existence.
At the end of the account, only me remains.
Or not. Maybe nothingness was waiting for him. But even this perspective, this uncertain "or not"... it was still he who thought it, he who envisaged it.
—
He continued to walk in this strange world, whose nature completely escaped him. Was it a punishment? A new chance? A simple cosmic chance? He didn't know anything about it.
No man-drawn roads, no familiar paths. No trees to offer a little shade or reference.
Only the infinite expanse of the undulating sand, dotted with stones with strange and irregular shapes. And this sky of a milky white, uniform and without nuances, without the reassuring presence of the visible sun, without the slightest indication of direction.
He did not know if he was wandering in the limbo of hell, a prisoner of a daydream with illogical rules, or a character in a novel whose plot he did not know.
But surprisingly, he wasn't afraid. A certain weariness in the face of the unknown had blunted this primitive emotion.
Because he had already collapsed a thousand times, under the weight of hunger, loneliness, despair.
And every time, in one way or another, he had always gotten up. An instinctive, almost animal resilience kept him alive.
Deep down, lurking like an ember under the ashes, he harboured a dream. A dream that he knew was silly, absurd in the eyes of the world, probably impossible to realise.
Understand everything. Exceeding everything,
Reshape the world, perhaps by his will.
He knew full well that even the most powerful kings, even the richest wealthy, even the supposed geniuses could not accomplish such an undertaking.
Because it was not a reasonable dream, it was a pure fairy tale, a chimaera born of his despair.
But he, a homeless man, a bastard forgotten by all, a simple nameless survivor,
He continued to believe in it, with irrational obstinacy.
Not because it was realistic or probable.
But because it was his. His refuge, his ultimate crutch.
And because in the end...
He was left to believe it.
⸻
End of Chapter 1.