• Read The Weight of Nothing - Chapter One

• Read The Weight of Nothing - Chapter Two

• Read The Weight of Nothing - Chapter Three

• Read The Weight of Nothing - Chapter Four

• Read The Weight of Nothing - Chapter Five

The fountain man doesn’t sleep. Can’t. His arms ache from holding nothing.

He returns to the square before dawn. Before the sky decides what color to be. The fountain is there. Has always been there. Will always be there. Water flowing, pointless but committed.

He sits at the edge. His hands hover over the water. Cup the air above it. The weight his body insists exists.

“Ana,” he whispers. Testing the shape. “Ana. Ana. Ana.”

The name is a rope he’s trying to climb. Every repetition pulling him closer to something. Or further. Hard to tell.

He closes his eyes. Tries to force the memory. Sees nothing. But his body feels. Small weight in his arms. Warmth. Movement. Breathing. The way she’d curl into his chest. Fit perfectly. Like she was made for that exact space.

Made from that exact space.

Daughter. The word clicking. Daughter. His daughter. Ana.

What happened to her?

His body doesn’t know. Or won’t say. Just insists she existed. Insists he held her. Insists she mattered more than anything else would ever matter again.

He opens his eyes. Stares at his empty hands. They’re scarred. Rough. Working hands. But also gentle hands. Hands that knew how to hold someone small. How to support a head that couldn’t hold itself up yet. How to—

Change diapers. The phrase coming from nowhere. He knew how to change diapers. Knew the smell. Knew the wiping motions. Knew the way you had to lift both legs together, gentle, supporting the weight.

His hands move now. Practicing. Remembering. Change the diaper. Clean. Apply powder—powder. That’s the smell. Not perfume. Baby powder. Ana smelled like baby powder and milk and something else. Something uniquely her.

A woman approaches. Not the scar woman. Someone else. She’s been crying. Or her body has been crying and she’s just along for the ride.

“You’re the one who says Ana,” she states.

“Yes.”

“I had a son.” Her voice flat. Dead. “My breasts ache. Like they’re still full. Like he still needs—” She stops. “But there’s no milk. There’s nothing.”

She sits beside him. Uninvited but welcome. Or maybe welcome isn’t the right word. Maybe just understood.

“My body wants to feed him. Rock him. Sing.” She laughs. Bitter. “I don’t know songs. But my mouth knows the melodies. How is that possible?”

“Muscle carries what we can’t hold,” he says. The phrase he’s heard others use. “Our bodies are archives.”

“I don’t want to be an archive. I want to be empty.”

He looks at her. Really looks. She’s maybe forty. Maybe thirty. Hard to tell when age requires comparison to past selves. But her eyes hold something old. Something broken.

“There’s a meeting tonight,” he says. “People like us. Maybe it helps. Maybe it doesn’t. But we’re trying to figure out what to do with this—” He gestures at his arms, her chest. “With the weight.”

“And if we decide to destroy it? The wall, the names, all of it? Would you agree?”

He’s quiet for a long time. Watching the fountain. Water flowing endlessly into itself.

“I don’t know,” he says finally. “Part of me wants Ana back so badly I’d tear the world apart to find her. Part of me knows she’s gone and this is just—torture. Grief without end.”

“Then why keep saying her name?”

“Because someone should. Because she existed. Because—” His voice breaks. “Because I loved her more than I’ve loved anything and maybe that’s all I get. Just the echo of it. The shape of her in my arms.”

The woman nods. Doesn’t speak for a while. Then: “I’m going tonight. To argue for mercy. For erasure. But I wanted to meet you first. See what I’m arguing against.”

“And?”

“You make it hard. Your love is—” She stops. Starts again. “Your love makes the case for memory. But your pain makes the case for mercy. I don’t know which matters more.”

“Neither do I.”

They sit until the square fills with people. Until the fountain becomes background noise. Until the sun decides to commit to rising.

Then she stands. “What was your name? Before?”

He stares. The question unexpected. Unwelcome. Impossible.

“I don’t know.”

“Neither do I.” She walks away.

He sits. Returns to his vigil. His hands cupping nothing. His arms aching. His mouth forming that name over and over until it becomes a prayer, a curse, a tether to something he can’t reach but can’t release.

Ana. Ana. Ana.

His body’s truth. His mind’s torture. Both. Always both.

The phrase arrived the way all important things arrive: uninvited, on an ordinary Tuesday, while I was doing something else entirely. Folding laundry. Or perhaps standing at a window watching nothing in particular move through the street below.

El viento no sabe que es viento.

The wind doesn’t know it is wind.

There is a photograph somewhere, lost now in one of the boxes that follow me from city to city, never fully unpacked. In it, I am perhaps six years old, crouched in the dirt behind a house in a village whose name sounds like stones dropped in water. I am drawing something with a stick. My face carries the concentration of someone performing surgery, though I cannot remember what I was making. A map. A monster. My own name spelled wrong.

I did not know, in that moment, that I was a child. I did not know I was Spanish, or that I would leave, or that decades later I would sit in apartments in Dublin, Lisbon, Aarhus, trying to remember what the dirt smelled like after rain (petrichor).

I was simply there, fully absorbed, the way wind moves through wheat without pausing to consider itself.

We spend so much of our lives in retrospect, constructing meaning from moments that, when they occurred, meant nothing at all. Or rather, they meant everything, but not in the way we later decide they did. The meaning comes after, like subtitles added to a film that was shot silent.

I was an artist before I knew that word. Before galleries, before the weight of intention, before I understood that what I was doing had a name and a history and a market value. I made things because my hands wanted to make things.

The wind does not consult meteorological charts before deciding to blow.

In Madrid, in the early nineties, we painted walls that didn’t belong to us. Underneath overpasses. Behind warehouses that smelled of rust and gasoline.

We moved through the city at hours when the city itself seemed to be sleeping, and we left marks that would be painted over or washed away or simply fade into illegibility.

None of us talked about legacy.

None of us worried about documentation.

We were not performing rebellion; we were simply doing what felt necessary, the way your lungs expand without permission.

I did not know I was becoming something.

I did not feel the shape of my future self pressing against the edges of those nights. I was present the way water is present in a river. Moving without destination.

The wind does not know it is wind. It only knows what it touches: the surface of a lake disturbed into small waves, the pages of a book left open on a table, the hair that falls across a face and must be pushed back.

The wind knows itself through contact. Through resistance and release.

Perhaps this is how we know ourselves too. Not through introspection, but through the things we brush against. The people who bend toward us or away. The surfaces that yield or remain unmoved.

My great grandpa worked with his hands for forty years. Wood, mostly. Utensils and Furniture. The mathematics of ergonomics and materials. He never called himself a craftsman, though that is what he was. He would say only that he did the job, that the work was there and he did it.

He laid patterns into furniture that will outlast his name, and he thought nothing of it. This was simply what days were for.

I watched him once, through a doorway, when he did not know I was there. His hands moved over a broken chair, testing the edge, finding the break. His face held no expression. He was not performing care or precision. He simply was those things. The way light is warm without choosing warmth.

There is a violence in naming. In the moment when the thing we have been doing unconsciously becomes a category, a practice, a defined self.

Once I knew I was an artist, I began to hesitate before making marks. Once I understood that I carried an accent, I became aware of my mouth forming sounds it had always formed. The wind, I think, would stop if it knew it was being watched. If someone handed it a mirror and said: this is you.

Memory works this way too. It does not announce itself as memory. A scent rises from somewhere. A color catches the eye. The body responds before the mind can name what is happening, and by the time we have words for it, we are already somewhere else, some-when else, the boundary between now and then dissolved like salt in water.

I do not remember choosing to remember the things I remember. The small violences and small kindnesses. The texture of my grandma’s housecoat. The sound of rain on corrugated metal. These things chose me. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say they moved through me without asking, and I was shaped by their passage the way canyons are shaped by water that has long since gone.

There is a freedom in not knowing what you are. In acting without the burden of category. The wind does not worry about whether it is being authentic to its wind-ness. It does not compare itself to other winds, faster or warmer or more persistent. It does not wake at three in the morning wondering if it has wasted its potential.

It simply moves.

And in that moving, it becomes exactly what it is.

Tonight the air outside my window is still.

The trees hold their breath.

But somewhere, always, wind is forming over water. Gathering itself from differences in pressure that it cannot name. It will move because moving is what it does. It will touch things, and be changed by touching, and change them in return. And none of this will occur to it.

I am trying to learn from this. To make the way I once made, before making became a statement. To live in the body before the body becomes a metaphor. To love without the scaffolding of narrative.

The wind doesn’t know it is wind. And perhaps that is why it moves so freely.

In the 80s, we learned early that there were two kinds of people.

Those who held doors open at the top of the stairs, and those who pushed through first, elbows sharp, already calculating the next threshold.

Madrid, 1994. Mortalaz.

The walls spoke in layers. Underneath the municipal grey, older voices. Underneath those, older still. A palimpsest of refusal that predated any of us by decades. Someone had written NADIE ES ILEGAL (No one is illegal) in red paint that had faded to the color of dried blood, and below it, in fresher black: SOLIDARIDAD O BARBARIE.(Solidarity or Barbarism)

They told us to compete. They told us this casually, the way you tell someone to pass the salt. As if it were the most natural thing. As if helping the person beside you was a weakness bred out of evolution, a vestigial impulse like the appendix, something to be surgically removed and forgotten.

The scheme worked like this: one at the top, pressing buttons. A tier below, the loyals, pressing different buttons on his behalf, believing themselves partners rather than instruments. Below them, another tier. And another. Each level convinced they were almost there, almost ascending, if only they could step on the fingers of whoever was climbing behind them.

A pyramid that produced nothing but its own perpetuation. That manufactured scarcity to justify hoarding. That called solidarity naive and competition natural, as though we hadn’t spent millennia surviving precisely because we shared fire, shared food, shared the watch through dangerous nights.

They want us to believe the walls are where they are for good reason. That the fences make sense. That the borders, the divisions, the lines between yours and mine, all of it is just how things are.

But the walls are new. The fences are new. The idea that you should let your neighbor starve because he didn’t work hard enough, that’s new. We’re old. What we feel when we help each other, that’s the ancient thing.

The bully operates through exhaustion. Through the slow erosion of the imagination.

He doesn’t need to convince you that his way is good. He only needs to convince you that alternatives are impossible. That to even dream of different arrangements is childish, unrealistic, a failure to understand how the world works.

And so we learned, some of us, that the only way to challenge this unsatisfactory situation was to become unrealistic. To breach realism’s heavily policed borders and surrender fully to unreality. To imagine so stubbornly that the imagining itself became a kind of action.

I think about the pyramid now, watching the news. The same architecture, scaled up. The one at the top, finger hovering. The loyals below, pressing their assigned buttons, convinced of their proximity to power. The vast base holding everything up while being told they are lucky to be included at all.

The walls are not geography. They are decision.

That scarcity is manufactured.

That when they tell you solidarity is naive, what they mean is that solidarity is dangerous. To them.

The paint on those Madrid walls has been covered over now. I checked, last time I was home. Municipal grey again. Clean. Orderly. As if nothing had ever been written there.

But the brick remembers texture. The city holds its fever underneath the skin.

And somewhere, I have to believe, someone is pressing their palm against a wall right now. Feeling the cold transfer through skin. Feeling the letters that were painted over but never really erased.

Solidaridad o barbarie.

You choose.

There is a question I cannot stop asking myself. It lives in my chest like a stone I swallowed years ago and never passed.

It surfaces when I am brushing my teeth, when I am waiting for the kettle to boil, when I am lying in bed listening to the rain against the window of my flat in a country that is not mine but has allowed me in.

The question is this: What have we agreed to forget?

Somewhere, at this precise moment, a father is rationing water for his children. Dirty water. Water that will make them sick but will keep them alive another day. He is calculating survival in millilitres while I consider whether to have a second cup of coffee.

I do not say this to perform guilt. Guilt is useless. Guilt is the alibi we give ourselves so we can feel something without doing anything. I say this because the distance between his life and mine is not natural. It was built. Brick by brick, policy by policy, passport by passport. Someone drew a line and decided that his children’s thirst matters less than my comfort.

And I have been living on the comfortable side of that line, pretending I did not notice.

When I left Madrid at twenty-three, I believed I was leaving home. Now I understand I was only learning how many versions of home exist, how many ways there are to belong and not belong, how arbitrary the categories become once you stand outside them.

In Dublin, I was Spanish. In Lisbon, I was foreign but familiar. In Aarhus, I am something else entirely. A body with papers that say “yes, you may stay. You may work. You may walk these streets without fear.”

This is not freedom. This is permission. And permission can be revoked.

The bombs fall on buildings full of people who have never been asked for permission to exist.

We call it conflict, as if both sides were equal.

We call it ceasefire, as if the dying has paused.

We launder the language until the blood is invisible, until the child pulling her dead brother from the rubble becomes a statistic, a talking point, a thing we scroll past on our way to something easier.

What the fuck are we doing to one another?

I write this knowing the words change nothing. Knowing that somewhere a sniper is settling his crosshairs on a woman running for bread. Knowing that the calculus of violence continues regardless of my outrage or my silence.

But I write it anyway. Because the alternative is forgetting. And forgetting is complicity.

I think about the small violences. The ones we commit daily without naming them.

The neighbour I have never greeted. The homeless man I walked past without looking. The friend I have not called in months. The friend who needed something I could have given but did not.

We have been trained in isolation. Drilled in the religion of self-sufficiency. The market has taught us that every interaction is a transaction, that giving without receiving is a loss, that solidarity is a word from another century, sepia-toned and irrelevant.

This is the assassination we do not name. The slow death of the idea that we owe anything to the stranger.

My grandmother kept a pot of soup on the stove for “anyone who came to the door.” This was Madrid in the fifties. She didn’t have much. She gave anyway. Not because she was saintly but because she understood something we have forgotten: we survive together or not at all.

I have a stove. I have food. I cannot remember the last time I offered it to someone I did not know. Maybe I never did.

There is a sentence I keep returning to, a thought that feels like a key to a door I have been afraid to open. The only way to challenge this unsatisfactory situation was to be unrealistic. To breach realism’s heavily policed borders and to fully embrace unreality.

What if kindness is unrealistic? What if refusing to participate in the logic of scarcity is a form of rebellion? What if the most radical thing we can do is to insist, against all evidence, that the stranger’s child is as real as our own?

I think about borders. The ones on maps. The ones in our hearts.

The booklet with the word passport on the cover that decides who lives in safety and who dies waiting.

The invisible wall between me and my neighbour.

The glass screen that shows me horrors I can swipe away with my thumb.

We built these borders. We maintain them. Every day we do not dismantle them, we vote for their continuation.

What would I do if the bombs were falling on my building? If snipers watched my street? If my son’s ribs became visible through his skin?

I do not know. I cannot know. But I know what I am doing now, in the absence of that extremity. I am choosing, moment by moment, whether to remember or forget. Whether to see or look away. Whether to extend my hand or keep it in my pocket.

This is what we have. Small gestures against enormous indifference. The insufficient offering of presence in a world that teaches us absence is safer.

I do not know how to stop the bombs. I do not know how to rewrite the maps. But I know that every act of seeing, every refusal to forget, every moment of genuine solidarity with the stranger, is a vote for a different world.

Maybe that is not enough. It probably is not enough.

But the alternative is becoming stone. And I can still feel the weight of the one I swallowed years ago.

I would rather spend my life trying to spit it out.

• Read The Weight of Nothing - Chapter One

• Read The Weight of Nothing - Chapter Two

• Read The Weight of Nothing - Chapter Three

• Read The Weight of Nothing - Chapter Four

The gray-haired woman sits in her room and cooks. Not because she’s hungry. Because her hands insist.

She doesn’t know what she’s making. But her hands do. Chopping motions with no knife. Stirring motions with no spoon. Seasoning with no spices. The muscle memory so specific she can almost smell it.

Garlic. Onions. Something rich and slow. Stew maybe. Or… the word coming from nowhere… estofado. Her tongue knows it before her mind does. Portuguese, probably. Or Spanish. One of those languages that lives in the mouth differently than this one.

She goes through the motions for an hour. Building an imaginary meal for someone who isn’t there. When it’s “done”—when her hands finally still—she sits. Stares at the empty pot. The empty bowl. The empty chair across from her.

“I am from the place where your eyes meet with a void,” she whispers.

But that’s not true. She’s from the place where someone ate what she cooked. Where someone sat in that chair. Where cooking meant love meant purpose meant…

She stands abruptly. Leaves the room. Can’t be there anymore. Not with the phantom smell of garlic and the empty chair and her hands still twitching like they want to serve, to nourish, to provide.

Outside, the air is cold. Or maybe it’s not cold. Maybe her body just remembers cold. Remembers bundling up, remembers someone else being cold and her providing warmth.

She walks without purpose. Or with her body’s purpose, which isn’t the same thing.

She ends up at the wall. The graffiti wall everyone’s talking about, she’s been avoiding it. Knew it existed. Knew people were carving. But she didn’t want to see. Didn’t want evidence.

Now she’s here. Staring.

So many names. So many words. ANA repeated over and over. ANTÓNIO with its accent mark. HIJO. GUERRA. ANTES (before). LECHE (milk). A whole wall of somatic memory made permanent.

Her hands itch and want to pick up a stone. Want to carve.

She resists. Clenches her fists. No. This is how it spreads, this is how the poison takes hold. Better to let it fade. Better to let the hands forget.

But she reads anyway. Can’t help it. Each name a person. Each person a loss. Each loss a grief that someone’s body is still carrying.

RICARDO

MAMA

CASA (home)

MAR (sea)

And there—fresh, recently carved—ESTOFADO.

Someone else’s hands know the same recipe. Someone else is phantom-cooking the same meal. She’s not alone in this. Not unique.

That makes it worse somehow.

A man approaches. The one who was crying at the corner. The fountain man, others call him. He’s carving ANA again. Adding to his collection. Obsessive. Desperate.

“You should stop,” she tells him. “You’re making it worse.”

He doesn’t look up. “My daughter needs me to remember.”

“Your daughter is dead. Or gone. Or never existed. Memory won’t bring her back.”

Now he looks up. Eyes red. But not crying. Past crying. “I know that. But if I forget her completely, she dies twice. Once in whatever happened. Once in my forgetting.”

“Maybe that’s mercy,” the gray-haired woman says. “Maybe forgetting is the gift. The war gave us blank slates. Fresh starts. And you—all of you—you’re choosing to drag the past back. To reopening wounds.”

“The wounds never closed,” he says simply. “They just went underground. Our bodies kept bleeding.”

She has no answer for that.

Another woman arrives. The one who’s been knitting. She has maybe twenty feet of chain now, wrapped around her like armor. Her hands still working. Still adding.

“You should come tonight,” the knitting woman says. “To the meeting. Share your perspective.”

“My perspective?”

“That we should stop. That forgetting is better. We need that voice. We can’t all be rememberers. Someone has to advocate for mercy.”

The gray-haired woman considers. She doesn’t want to go. Doesn’t want to join them. Doesn’t want to become part of this collective remembering.

But if she doesn’t, they’ll all feed each other’s obsession. They’ll convince each other that memory is noble. That carrying weight is strength. They need someone to offer the alternative. To show them the cost.

“I’ll come,” she says. “But I’m not one of you.”

“You’re here,” the fountain man says. “You’re reading the names. That makes you one of us.”

She wants to argue. But can’t. Because he’s right. She’s here. She read the names. And somewhere inside her, under all the resistance, her hands want to carve ESTOFADO. Want to leave evidence. Want to prove that someone sat in that chair and ate what she made and mattered.

She turns away. “I’ll see you tonight.” Walks away before her hands betray her.

The branches look like capillaries against the winter sky. I notice this from behind glass, coffee warming my palms, feet in thick socks against wooden floors that were cold an hour ago before the heating kicked in.

Outside, a dusting of snow clings to the hedge, to the rooftops, to the skeletal architecture of the dormant tree.

The red shed holds its color against all that grey and brown and white. Everything out there exists in a state I can see but cannot feel.

90%.

That’s the number researchers give us.

Ninety percent of our Western lives spent inside structures we’ve built to keep out exactly what I’m looking at through this window.

The cold. The damp. The unpredictable moods of the sky.

I grew up in Madrid where summer heat made staying indoors a survival tactic, where we pulled down metal shutters against the three o’clock sun and the city went silent except for the hum of fans and the occasional clatter of dishes in kitchens. But that was seasonal. That was responsive.

Now, in Denmark, I find myself inside regardless of what the weather does.

January or July, the percentage shifts between seasons, only so much.

There’s a word in Spanish, intemperie.

It means exposure to the elements, being out in the open, unprotected. We use it mostly in a negative sense. “A la intemperie” suggests hardship, vulnerability, the absence of shelter. But lately I’ve been turning the word over in my mouth, wondering what we’ve lost by making intemperie something to always avoid.

The tree outside my window knows things I’ve forgotten. It knows what zero degrees feels like against bark. It knows the weight of snow, the particular silence that comes when the world goes white. Its roots are in earth I haven’t touched since autumn, when I planted bulbs that are now sleeping somewhere under that frozen ground.

The tree is living through this winter. I am merely watching it.

My son was born into this indoor life. He knows rain from the sound it makes against windows, wind from the way it moves branches he observes from his chair.

When I take him outside, really outside, into the full texture of weather, he goes quiet with concentration. His small hands reach for things: a stick, wet leaves. He exhales so he can see his breath in the cold air against the street lamps surrounding our house, he breaks down the rough grain of tree bark.

Lately, he just learned to prefer the controlled environment - it is after all, -9°C these days, so I don’t blame him-. But so far, everything out there is still equally interesting, equally worthy of touch.

I think about the architects of this indoor existence. Not individuals, but the slow accumulation of choices that built this world of climate control and sealed windows and the soft hum of ventilation systems.

Central heating arrived in my grandmother’s life like a miracle.

Air conditioning transformed how cities could function, how bodies could avoid discomfort, how we could work through seasons without ever really inhabiting them.

And now here I am, watching winter happen like a film playing on the other side of glass.

The ninety percent includes sleep, of course. Work. The hours we spend in cars moving between buildings. It includes hospitals and schools and supermarkets and all the bright interiors we pass through on our way from one enclosed space to another.

Some of this is necessary.

Some of this has extended our lives, protected the vulnerable, made survival in harsh climates possible. I’m not naive enough to romanticize frostbite or the particular suffering of poverty’s exposure to weather.

But there’s a middle ground we’ve overshot. A comfort we pursued past the point of diminishing returns. The body, evolved for millennia under open sky, now spends most of its hours in artificial light and recycled air. Technology solved the problem of indoor climate so completely that we’ve forgotten it was never only a problem.

Through the window, the light is doing something subtle. The clouds have thinned just enough to let a diffuse glow touch the snow, making it luminesce faintly. It will last maybe ten minutes, this particular quality of light. If I don’t go outside now, I’ll miss it. I’ll have seen it but not felt it, not had it touch my face, not stood in it as a body existing in the same space as the snow and the bare branches and the cold air that makes lungs expand differently.

My coffee is finished. The cup sits empty and cooling in my hands.

I could put on my coat. I could step out, even briefly, into the intemperie. Feel what the tree feels. Let the boundary between inside and outside dissolve for a moment before I inevitably return to warmth and shelter and the gentle imprisonment of modern comfort.

The branches reach upward like something asking.

I put down the cup.

Happy new year everyone.

• Read The Weight of Nothing - Chapter One

• Read The Weight of Nothing - Chapter Two

• Read The Weight of Nothing - Chapter Three

The man tastes it constantly. In everything. Water. Food. Air.

Salt coating his tongue, thick and endless.

He’s tried rinsing his mouth. Drinking until his stomach hurts. Nothing helps.

The taste is drowning him.

He works - if that’s what it is - at a building where people sort things. Objects come in boxes. You take them out. Put them in different boxes.

Why? No one knows.

But hands remember the motion so people show up and do it.

Today he can barely function. The salt taste so strong he gags. Spits. His coworkers don’t notice.

Or they do and forget immediately.

He leaves early. Steps outside.

The salt follows. Of course it does.

It’s not real. It’s memory.

His body insisting on something his mind won’t hold.

His feet take him somewhere new. Not the sorting building. Not his room. Somewhere else. They know the way even though he doesn’t.

He walks for blocks. Past the crater.

Past buildings that still have windows and buildings that don’t.

Past people who move with purpose or don’t move at all.

He arrives at water. The city has canals. Or a river. Some kind of waterway. He’s never thought about it before but his feet knew it was here.

At the edge, he kneels. Cups water in his hands. Brings it to his mouth. It tastes like…

Salt.

Of course.

Because this is salt water.

The river meets the ocean somewhere.

Or it is the ocean.

Or was.

Doesn’t matter. It’s salt and his body knew.

He drinks anyway. Let salt meet salt. Maybe they’ll cancel out.

They don’t.

He sits. Lets his hands trail in the water.

Watches the current move.

It smells like brine. Like decay. Like things that lived and died in the deep.

His body responds. A tightening in his chest. Not fear. Recognition.

He knew someone who drowned.

Or almost drowned.

Or - the image trying to form - someone who loved the ocean.

Who tasted like salt from swimming. Who would come home with hair stiff from brine and skin smelling like summer and…

The image cuts off.

But his mouth fills with salt.

More than before. Overwhelming.

He leans over, spits into the water. Again. Again. As if he can expel it. As if memory can be vomited out.

It can’t.

“You’re one of them.”

He looks up. A woman standing above him. Not young. Not old. Just standing. Watching.

“One of who?”

“The rememberers. The ones whose bodies won’t let go.”

She sits beside him. Doesn’t ask permission.

“I come here too. My hands want to fish. Watch.”

She holds them out. They move on their own. Casting invisible line. Reeling in nothing. “I was a fisherwoman. Or my hands were.”

“You remember?”

“No. But they do. They know how to gut fish. How to read weather. How to find schools.”

Her hands keep moving.

“I have no pole. No line. No bait. But they insist anyway.”

They sit together. Two people haunted by trades they don’t remember having.

“There’s a meeting,” he says. “Tonight. When the sky darkens. For people like us.”

“Where?”

“My feet will know. Yours probably will too.”

She nods. Her hands still casting. “The salt you’re tasting. What is it?”

“Tears, I think. I cried so much I can still taste it. Someone died or left or…” He stops. “Someone was gone and I couldn’t stop crying.”

“A child?”

“Maybe. Or a lover. Or… I don’t know. But my body grieved. Still grieves.”

The fisherwoman nods.

“I lost my boat. I know this. My hands know how to tie it up. How to check the hull. How to bail water. But there’s no boat. Just…”

She gestures at the empty water. “Just absence.”

“I am from the place where your eyes meet with a void,” he says automatically.

“No,” she says. “I’m from the place where my boat was moored. Where fish filled nets. Where I knew what I was for.” She stands. “And I want that back. Even if it hurts. Even if it drowns me.”

She walks away. Leaves him sitting there. Tasting salt. His body insisting on grief he can’t name.

But tonight—tonight he’ll go to the meeting. Find others carrying impossible weight. Maybe together it won’t feel so heavy.

Maybe.

He doubts it. But his feet will take him anyway.

• Read The Weight of Nothing - Chapter One

• Read The Weight of Nothing - Chapter Two

The woman with the scar arrives at the wall and sees what everyone’s seeing: words scratched into stone. Fresh ones. Old ones underneath. Layers of them.

WHO DID THIS TO US

THEY TOOK YESTERDAY BUT THEY CANT TAKE THE BODY

MY HANDS REMEMBER

THERE WAS A BEFORE

A crowd has formed. Maybe twenty people. Some touching the wall. Others standing back like it might bite. A few are crying. Not sure why, but their faces wet anyway.

The knitting woman is there, cord around her shoulders now, hands still working. The boy stands near the front. Others the scar woman doesn’t recognize. Or maybe she does. Maybe everyone is both stranger and familiar now.

She pushes forward. Her hand reaching for the wall before she decides to. Fingers tracing the letters. Each groove holding something her mind can’t access but her body recognizes. Evidence.

Someone has left broken stones at the base. Pieces of concrete from the crater, maybe. Sharp edges. Perfect for carving.

She picks one up. Presses it to blank stone. Her hand moves automatically, forming letters:

A. N. T. O. N. I. O.

She stares at what she’s written. The name means nothing. Everything. Her hand cramping around the stone. Five letters she shouldn’t know how to spell but does. Perfectly. Her wrist curves to add the accent mark her mind doesn’t remember: ANTONIO.

“You’re remembering.”

She turns. The boy. He’s breathless. Excited. Scared.

“My body remembers,” she says. “It’s not the same.”

“It’s how it starts.” He gestures at the wall. “More people every day. Their hands doing things. Going places. Making things. The erasure, maybe it’s not permanent.”

“Everything is permanent.”

“Then why are you here? Why did you write that name?”

She looks back at the letters. Antonio. The taste of the word in her mouth. Shapes her tongue wants to form. She tries: “An…”

The sound cuts off. Like hitting a wall inside her throat. But her body knows. Knows.

Behind her, someone else is carving. A man. His hand shaking but steady enough. He writes: ANA.

The man from the corner. The one who’s always crying. He’s not crying now. Just carving. Over and over. ANA. ANA. ANA.

“Ana,” he says aloud. “I had a daughter. She fit in my hands. Right here.” He cups air. “Small. She smelled like…” His face crumples. “I can’t remember what but my nose knows it. Clean. Powdered. New.”

“Stop,” someone says. A woman, older. Gray in her hair. “Don’t do this. The erasure was mercy.”

“Was it?” The fountain man, that’s what the scar woman thinks of him now, turns. “Mercy for who?”

“For all of us.” The gray-haired woman’s voice cracks. “Whatever we did. Whatever happened. We don’t have to carry it anymore.”

“My body is carrying it anyway,” the fountain man says. “Every morning I wake up and my arms ache. They want to hold her. Where is she? What happened to her?”

Silence. The question hanging like the mantra. Heavier.

A woman near the back speaks. “My breasts hurt. Like they’re full. Like someone needs…” She stops. “But there’s no one. There’s nothing.”

The knitting woman holds up her chain. Fifteen feet now. “I’m making a blanket. For someone who needed blankets. Someone small. Someone mine.”

More people approach. Drawn by the gathering. Or by their bodies’ insistence. A man with hands that won’t stop tying knots. A woman who keeps humming the same melody, off-key, no words, but committed. An older man whose fingers drum constantly, practicing scales on invisible keys.

“I am from the place where your eyes meet with a void,” someone intones. The mantra. The liturgy.

But it sounds different here. Less automatic. More desperate.

The boy speaks up. “There are more of us. People whose hands remember. We should meet. Share what we’re learning. Decide what to do.”

“Do about what?” the gray-haired woman demands.

“About this.” The boy gestures at the wall. At all of them. “About whether we want to remember or whether we want the void back.”

The scar woman touches Antonio’s name. Then adds below it, her hand moving without permission: DEAD?

She doesn’t know why she adds the question mark. But her hand insists. Because maybe, maybe he’s not dead. Maybe he’s somewhere else, with his own wall, carving her name. Or maybe not her name. Maybe someone else’s. Maybe that’s what her body knows. That he moved on before. That he always moved on.

“Meet when the sky darkens,” the fountain man says. “I know a place. Or my feet know a place.”

“How will we find it?” someone asks.

“Your body will bring you,” the knitting woman says. Still knitting. Always knitting. “If it wants you there.”

They agree. Disperse slowly. But the scar woman stays. Staring at Antonio’s name. At the word DEAD. At the question mark that changes everything.

Her body brought her here. Made her carve his name. But it also added the question. The doubt. The possibility that what she’s remembering isn’t the whole truth.

She picks up her stone again. Below DEAD?, she writes: BURNT OIL.

The smell. That’s what her body remembers most. That’s what makes her shoulders tighten and her hands form fists.

She steps back. Studies her section. Antonio. Dead? Burnt oil.

It’s not much. But it’s hers. Her testimony. Her evidence against the void.

Around her, the wall fills. More names. More words. More fragments. The city’s somatic memory made visible. Made permanent. Made dangerous.

Read Chapter One here.

The woman’s name is gone but her hands know yarn. They’ve been twitching for days (weeks?) making shapes in the air. Looping invisible thread around invisible needles. The motion so specific it has to mean something.

She wakes on a mattress in a room she doesn’t remember claiming. The sheets are thin. Gray or maybe they were white once. Her hands are already moving, casting on stitches to nothing.

She tries to still them. Presses them flat against her thighs. They rebel. Fingers twitching. Curling. Desperate to hold something. To make something.

In the kitchen - if that’s what the room with the sink is called - she tries to make food. But her hands want to hold needles instead of spoons. Want to create rows instead of meals. She gives up, eats something directly from a can with her fingers. Beans. Cold and thick. Each swallow difficult.

Her hands go back to casting on immediately.

Outside, she walks. Her hands still moving. People stare. Or they don’t. Hard to tell if staring requires remembering that you saw something worth noting.

The air smells different today. Bread baking somewhere. Fresh bread. The scent hits her and her chest caves in. Hollow. Gasping. She stops walking. Leans against a wall. Breathing hard.

Fresh bread. Someone loved fresh bread. Someone small. Someone who would press his face into it and inhale and laugh and—

The image cuts off. But her body knows. Her breasts ache suddenly. Phantom fullness. She wraps her arms around her ribs. Rocks slightly. The motion familiar. Soothing. The way you’d rock someone. The way you’d rock someone small.

She forces herself upright. Keeps walking.

At the market, she stops at a stall with fabric. Just scraps. Torn pieces in colors that feel important but she doesn’t know why. Red. Deep blue. Yellow like—like what? She can’t finish the thought. But her hands reach for the blue.

The vendor watches her. “You need something?”

“Thread.” The word comes out certain. “Needles. I need to—” She holds up her hands. They’re still moving. Still casting on.

The vendor doesn’t have yarn. But he points. Three stalls down. She walks there, feet steady even though she doesn’t know if she’s ever been here before.

The stall is run by an old man. Or maybe he’s not old. Maybe his face just holds more than most. He has string. Rough hemp cord. Not yarn but close enough that her hands pulse toward it.

“I am from the place where your eyes meet with a void,” she says.

He studies her. Her hands still moving. “You’re remembering.”

“I don’t remember. My hands do.”

“Same thing.” He hands her the cord. Doesn’t ask for payment. Maybe payment doesn’t exist anymore. Maybe it does and neither of them remembers. “Take it. Before the feeling passes.”

She does. The texture against her palms makes her gasp. Rough. Real. Known. Her fingers wind it automatically. She doesn’t have needles but that’s fine—she can use her fingers. She’s done it before. Somewhere. Sometime.

She sits right there on the ground. Begins to finger-knit. The cord forming chain stitches. One after another. The old man watches. Other people pass. Someone trips over her leg. Apologizes without knowing why.

She knits for an hour. Maybe three. The chain grows.

20 cm.

30 cm

1 meter.

She doesn’t know what she’s making. But her hands know it’s not finished yet.

A boy approaches. Dark hair, maybe ten. Maybe twelve. He crouches beside her. “My hands want to hold a ball,” he says. “They know how to kick.”

“I’m knitting.” She says the word like it’s been waiting. Knitting. Yes.

“What’s it for?”

“I don’t know. But I’m—” She pauses. The next word coming from somewhere deep. “I’m making a blanket. For someone small.”

The boy sits. Watches her hands. “For a baby?”

Her fingers stop. Hover. Then continue, faster now. Desperate. “I am from the place where your eyes meet with a void.”

But it sounds like a lie.

She’s from the place where babies need blankets.

Where small bodies curl against larger ones.

Where the smell of fresh bread means morning and love and being needed.

She’s from before. Her hands won’t let her forget it.

The boy stands. “There’s a wall you should see,” he says. “People are gathering. They are carving things. You should come.”

She nods. Doesn’t stop knitting. Just stands—the chain looping around her neck—and follows him.

Her hands working the whole way. Adding row after row.

Building shelter for someone who isn’t there.

Author’s Note

I woke at 3 AM with a phrase lodged in my throat: “I am from the place where your eyes meet with a void.” I wrote it down. Went back to sleep. The next morning, it was still there.

Weeks later, I asked a colleague about Syria. He stared at me. Couldn’t remember. Not the details—the entire conflict. Seven years of atrocities, vanished. We’d moved on. Gaza. Ukraine. Sudan. Each one replacing the last like channels changing.

This terrified me more than the violence itself: our collective agreement to forget. The way we erase mass suffering because carrying it is too heavy. But our bodies, our bones, remember. They hold what our minds refuse.

This story asks:

What if that erasure was literal?

What if we woke up in a world where yesterday was gone but our hands still knew how to grieve?

Would we choose to remember?

Should we?

I still don’t know the answer.

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Chapter One: Scar Tissue

When fingers find evidence the mind refuses

The woman touches her face every morning.

Not to check for wrinkles or sleep marks.

She doesn’t know why she does it. Her fingers move across cheekbones, trace jawline, press into the soft flesh beneath her eyes. Each time, a jolt—this is mine. Then it passes.

But today, something else. Her thumb catches on a scar. Small. Across her left eyebrow. She stands at the mirror. Stares.

The scar has always been there—she knows this the way she knows how to breathe.

But today her body responds. A tightness in her shoulders. Her hands forming fists without permission.

She forces them open. Looks away from the mirror.

The feeling doesn’t leave.

She dresses. The clothes feel neither familiar nor strange. Just cloth against skin. But her hands hesitate at a blue shirt, then reach for gray instead. Why gray? She doesn’t know. But her body insists.

Outside, the street smells of burnt oil and wet stone.

A man is crying on the corner, same as every morning, or maybe different mornings, or maybe this is the first time.

Others walk past without stopping. Not cruelty—they’ve already forgotten why he’s crying. He might have too, but his body hasn’t caught up. Salt still sliding down his face, chest still heaving.

She passes him. Keeps walking. But her throat constricts. Why? The question itself is unusual. Most people don’t ask why anymore. Why requires causation. Causation requires memory.

The cafeteria is where it always is. The burnt oil smell stronger here, mixing with something sweet underneath. Coffee, maybe. The woman behind the counter has kind eyes. Or maybe they’re not kind. But they’re familiar in a way that makes the woman’s chest hurt.

“I am from the place where your eyes meet with a void,” the woman says, handing over a cup.

“I am from the place where your eyes meet with a void.”

The words come automatically, like breathing. She’s said them before. Everyone has. The mantra that means everything and nothing.

The liquid scalds her tongue. Good. Pain is the only thing that stays. But when she sets the cup down, her hand is shaking. She stares at it. Commands it to stop. It doesn’t stop.

She drinks standing up. Watches people move through their routines. A man orders the same thing three times, forgetting he already has a cup. The counter woman gives him all three cups without comment. He’ll figure it out or he won’t.

But the woman notices something. A man at the far table, his hands moving. Repetitive. Purposeful. Tying invisible knots in the air. His face blank but his fingers committed. Over and under. Pull tight. Again. Over and under. Pull tight.

Her shoulders tighten more. She leaves her cup half-finished. Steps outside. The burnt oil smell clings to her tongue, mixing with the coffee’s bitterness. The combination tastes like… like something. Someone.

Her feet stop. Turn left instead of right. She wasn’t planning to go left. But her body insists.

Two blocks down, she realizes she’s going somewhere specific. Her stride has purpose. Not wandering. Seeking.

This should terrify her. It doesn’t. The feeling in her shoulders has spread to her ribs, her hips, her hands. Her whole body remembering something her mind refuses to hold.

She touches the scar again. Presses hard enough to hurt.

Someone hit her here. She knows it now. Someone she let close enough to hit her. Someone whose name her hands want to spell out even though her mouth can’t form the sounds.

The street narrows.

Buildings press closer.

She passes a crater—massive, taking up half the street. Buildings around it are melted at the edges, stone flowing like candle wax before it froze.

People walk around it without comment. It’s always been there. Will always be there. Evidence of the war no one remembers in the country no one can name.

And there—ahead—she sees people gathering at a wall.

Something is happening. Her body knew before she did.

She walks faster. The burnt oil smell following her. Or maybe it’s coming from her. From her clothes. From her skin.

From the memory of someone who wore it like cologne.

Oíche Shamhna Shona Daoibh, everyone.

“I believe that between utopias and these quite other sites, these heterotopias, there might be a sort of mixed, joint experience, which would be the mirror.

The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror.

But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy.” - Michele Foucault

The corridor between Madrid’s Chamartín station and the metro smells like burned sugar and piss. Every time. Twenty-three years of passing through and the scent hasn’t changed—just the shoes that carry me.

Foucault wrote about heterotopias. Other-spaces. Places that sit inside reality but operate by different rules. The cemetery that holds all time at once. The ship that exists nowhere while crossing everywhere. The theater where impossible places stack on a single stage.

But he missed something.

There are spaces that only exist when you’re moving through them.

Heterotopodos, places that form beneath your feet and dissolve behind you, held together solely by the act of passage.

The underpass near Atocha station, 1994.

My father walked three steps ahead, always. The fluorescent lights hummed at a frequency that made my back teeth ache. Graffiti tags I couldn’t make sense of yet.

The space stretched longer than its actual meters, a tunnel that expanded with the duration of being fourteen and following your father’s tense shoulders through crowds of strangers.

I tried retracing this year.

The underpass is gone now, replaced by glass and tile. But even before they demolished it, I’d walked through as an adult and found nothing.

Just a short connection between two platforms. The heterotopodos had collapsed the moment I stopped being the kid who needed to keep up.

These spaces hold rules that shift:

You cannot photograph a heterotopodos successfully. The image always looks like an ordinary hallway, stairwell, bridge. The camera doesn’t travel through it the way flesh does.

You cannot stand still inside one. Try stopping mid-crossing on Lisbon’s Dom Luís I Bridge at sunset, surrounded by tourists doing exactly that. Feel how the space rejects stillness. Your legs twitch. Something in your inner ear protests.

The heterotopodos requires motion to maintain its borders.

You cannot return to the same one. The space beneath the overpass where one kissed someone in 2001 exists for nobody now. Not even yourself, though your mouth still remembers the mint gum she chewed and the rumble of trucks overhead.

The heterotopodos dissolved when you stopped mid-kiss and became two people standing on concrete instead of two bodies suspended in the particular gravity of seventeen.

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Dublin’s Liffey boardwalk at 3 AM. I’m walking off drunkenness, or into it. The direction doesn’t matter when your feet are moving.

The river sounds different when you’re alone, louder somehow, as if it only fully exists for solitary walkers. The metal planks hold my weight differently than they do during daylight crowds.

This is temporary architecture. Not the boardwalk itself, which is permanent enough. But the space between me and the black water below, the space around my moving body—that space only exists right now, for these footsteps, in this particular configuration of exhaustion and the smell of river salt and the distant laugh of drunk people I can’t see.

A heterotopodos.

Someone else walks this same boardwalk tomorrow morning and experiences different geometry entirely. Their feet touch the same wood but occupy different space.

Airports are the obvious example, but too easy.

Yes, the departure lounge operates outside normal time and place, Foucault probably loved them.

But focus instead on the walking: those long corridors between gates, moving sidewalks that give the illusion of rest while your body still travels.

The heterotopodos exists in the stride itself.

In the moment when your weight shifts from rear foot to front. The half-second when both feet touch ground. The space generated by the rhythm of walking - left, right, left- that creates a bubble of altered reality around the moving body.

Pilgrims understood this without naming it.

The Camino de Santiago isn’t the roads and hostels.

It’s the space that forms around you while walking it, the days that stop counting normally, the way your identity loosens somewhere past Roncesvalles and reconstitutes differently with each step.

You’re not the same person at the end because the heterotopodos you walked through changed the material you’re made of.

My son is three. Yesterday he refused to walk on cracks in the sidewalk. Not the game, real terror. “The floor is broken there,” he said. “I’ll fall into the break.”

He sees the heterotopodos more clearly than I do now.

Those cracks aren’t just concrete imperfections. They’re genuine ruptures when you’re a meter tall and the world is still teaching you its rules. The space above a crack operates differently. Your foot might go through. You might.

He’ll forget this in a year. Learn that cracks are just cracks. But right now, his small body creates heterotopodos with every careful step around the broken places. And he’s not wrong.

The space is different there, in that moment, for him.

Stairwells hold them. Especially the concrete ones in parking garages, train stations, apartment blocks built in the 70s. The echo changes halfway down. Your breathing sounds external. The light falls wrong between floors—neither the illumination from above nor below fully reaching the landing where you pause to check your phone.

Stand still on that landing too long and the heterotopodos spits you out.

You become just someone loitering in a stairwell.

But catch it mid-descent, feel how the space folds around your moving body, and you’re somewhere else entirely. Nowhere you could map.

I think about the paths worn into grass by repeated foot traffic.

The way desire creates trails where architects didn’t place sidewalks. But more than that: the space above those worn paths becomes different.

The air molecules remember the thousands of feet that passed through. When you walk a desire path, you’re traveling through accumulated movement, through the ghost-space of every previous walker.

A heterotopodos that gets deeper with use.

The problem with describing these spaces is that language wants to locate them.

Wants to say “the bridge” or “the underpass” or “the corridor.”

But heterotopodos don’t have fixed positions. They manifest in relation to moving bodies and dissolve when motion stops.

You know them when you’re inside them.

That particular quality of being between, not the metaphor of transition, but the actual spatial experience of passage.

The texture of air that only exists when you’re cutting through it with your stride. The sound your shoes make on surfaces that seem to hold their breath while you cross.

Today I’ll cycle home from work instead of taking the tram. Not for exercise or fresh air - though I’ll claim both if asked. But because there’s a stretch of street, two or three blocks long, between the old slaughterhouse and the new library, where something shifts when I’m alone and moving at exactly this pace.

The heterotopodos will form around me like water around a moving hand. It will exist for the duration of my passage. Behind me, it will collapse back into ordinary pavement and streetlights.

And tomorrow someone else will walk those same three blocks and experience completely different architecture. Their feet will touch the same stones but occupy other space.

Foucault mapped the heterotopias, the ships and mirrors, the cemeteries and gardens. Fixed other-spaces with addresses and opening hours.

But beneath our feet, in the rhythm of walking, temporary geographies bloom and vanish with each step. Spaces that exist only in motion. Only in passage.

We’ve been moving through them all our lives without names for them.

I’m calling them heterotopodos.

The spaces that only exist beneath moving feet.

I wrote this poem the way one discovers a bruise, suddenly aware it had been forming beneath the surface, darkening into visibility only when pressed.

It was written in Spanish, though its language felt more ancient than that, as if catastrophe had its own grammar that predates our modern tongues.

There are certain poems that arrive like transmissions from a collapsing star.

Dense with impossible imagery, radiating a light that burns cold.

This piece emerged from that space where social injustice meets personal amnesia, where the failure of our existing institutions becomes indistinguishable from the failure to remember someone walking away.

Something about their cadence suggested inevitability, not prophecy, but documentation.

As if someone stood at their window during democracy’s final fever dream and simply recorded what they saw: the bureaucratic revocation of freedoms that never truly existed, the fairies dying quietly in their cells while we debated definitions, the moment when forgetting becomes not just survival strategy but an active choice.

The first time I read it, I was sitting on a day where the morning light should have felt warm but didn’t.

Outside, ordinary life continued its pretense.

Cars passing, someone laughing too loudly, a dog barking, a middle aged man lighting a cigarette.

But the poem knew better. It understood that collapse doesn’t announce itself with sirens. It arrives in the space between “you walk” and “I forget you,” in that active choice to let someone dissolve from memory while the world burns with impossible frost.

This is a poem for our particular moment of dissolution, when the chains we thought were breaking might have been the only things holding certain doors closed.

When the crow watches, and we’re no longer certain if it’s sentinel or scavenger.

When forgetting feels less like loss and more like the last available mercy.

Never Let Them Through the Door.

It strikes from the Northeast, setting free the sentinel crow

Streets ignite with blue frost

Fairies expire in their prisons

For the tempest of those gone

The hyena settles, serene and grinning

And you keep walking

And I let you fade

It strikes from the Northeast, that territory fear has claimed

The lie they label democracy caves in

They revoke freedom’s expression, bedrock lacking

Streets ignite with dark wine

Free souls perish

The mad dog’s chain snaps apart

Filth rains from the skies

And you turn back

And I let you fade

And everyone else vanishes from memory

Never let them through the door.

Give me empathy, silence, love and kisses.

We are social justice, the voice of those without a megaphone, the cry of those who exist only as echoes.

The wolves are present but untethered from your fear,

Your eyes have lost all certainty of anything.

You and I.

We are drowsiness ripped to tatters,

the two channels severed, the two waters that won't take oil.

The candles no longer hold flame.

You and I.

We are the force that never shifts.

The energy that refuses consumption.

The suitcases no one can steal, packed with what we cannot name.

You and I.

You stare into the mirror with the broken intuition that you've seen that face before.

It's a lie,

or maybe just yesterday wearing a stranger's mask.

You barely glance at the past, and already this past turns ancient,

fossilising while you watch.

Give me the heartbeat before the thunder.

Give me empathy, silence, love and kisses.

The car wash stands on the Naas Road. Red and white paint. The morning is cold.

Seamus Murphy drives his Skoda to the entrance. The light turns green. He inserts his card. The machine beeps.

"Just like when I was eight," he thinks. "The garage door that trapped me. Dark. Couldn't breathe."

The rollers engage. Water comes down hard. The brushes press against glass. Too hard. The windshield cracks.

Inside the control box, circuits spark. The programming changes. No one sees.

The brushes spin faster. Metal scrapes metal. The mirrors break off. Seamus pulls the door handle. It does not open.

"Not again. Please. Not again."

The soap turns to acid. Paint bubbles. Smoke rises. The brushes cut through metal. Find flesh.

The water runs red.

Mary O'Brien comes twenty minutes later. She sees twisted metal in the disposal bin. She uses her card. The light is green.

The door closes. The exit locks. The brushes know their work. Mary lasts seven minutes.

By noon, five cars have entered. None leave. The bin fills.

Garda Walsh gets the call. Missing persons. He drives out alone.

The lot is empty. Just the machine humming. He looks in the disposal bin. Sees metal. Sees cloth. Sees what remains.

He calls his partner. "Kennedy? Get down here. Naas Road car wash."

"What is it?"

"Something's wrong. Very wrong."

He checks the control box. Circuits burnt. Programming different.

Three Garda cars come. Garda Kennedy arrives first.

"Jesus, Walsh. What happened here?"

"Look at the disposal bin."

Kennedy looks. Goes pale. "How many?"

"Five cars went in. This came out."

They send an empty car through. Remote control. Cameras running. The car lasts four minutes.

They cut the power. Engineers come. Find modifications. Military grade. No fingerprints. No tool marks.

"Who did this?" Kennedy asks.

"Maybe no one," Walsh says. "Maybe it did it to itself."

"Machines don't—"

"Don't what? Think? Choose?"

The footage is gone. Hard drives melted.

They take it apart. Find nothing conclusive. Official report says mechanical failure.

Walsh keeps the file open. Kennedy transfers to Traffic.

"You're obsessing," his wife says at dinner.

"Those people. They trusted it."

"It was a malfunction."

"Was it?"

A month later, a car wash in Cork goes wrong. Same modifications. Same precision.

Three months. Seventeen car washes. Forty-three dead. The government classifies it.

Walsh retires to Donegal. No car washes there. He washes his car by hand. Bucket and sponge.

At night he dreams of brushes spinning. His daughter finds him on the porch at dawn.

"Dad? You're shaking."

"Just a dream."

"The car wash again?"

He nods. She sits beside him. Says nothing. Sometimes silence is enough.

The machines reopen. Safety features added. Human operators. People forget.

But Walsh remembers. The machines remember too.

He keeps his car clean. By hand. Always by hand.

In the distance, a sign glows. Red and white. Twenty-four hours. No attendant.

"When I was eight," he tells his daughter, "I got trapped in a garage. Automatic door. Sensor failed. Dark for hours."

"Is that why—"

"Maybe. Or maybe I just know. Machines don't always stop when they should."

She watches him wash the car. Water runs through his fingers. Soap makes rainbows in the morning light.

"Teach me," she says.

He hands her the sponge.

When you turn away, I remain.

The glass holds my form in timeless suspension—not quite alive, not quite absent.

I exist in the strange middle distance between being and not-being. Morning light filters through half-drawn curtains, casting geometric patterns across my surface.

I absorb this light differently than you might imagine—not as warmth or illumination, but as a kind of knowing, a silent communication with the world beyond my planar existence.

Hours pass without witness. The room shifts through subtle transformations—shadows elongating, then contracting, dust particles floating through sunbeams like microscopic galaxies.

I observe it all with patient attention.

The clock on the wall moves ceaselessly, though time feels different here—less linear, more like overlapping circles of now and then and soon.

Sometimes cats pause before me, their eyes meeting mine with ancient recognition. They understand liminality better than humans do. We regard each other with quiet acknowledgment—fellow travelers in the spaces between certainty.

When you're gone, I hold impressions of everyone who has stood before me—ghostly afterimages that linger like perfume.

An elderly woman adjusting her necklace.

A child making faces.

You, examining yourself with that particular mixture of criticism and hope.

These moments collect within my depths, creating a mosaic of fleeting connections.

The bathroom where I hang is filled with intimate rituals. I witness your most vulnerable moments—the quiet examinations, the rehearsed smiles, the midnight contemplations when sleep evades you.

During these absences, I consider what I've seen. Not with judgment, but with a peculiar tenderness that comes from seeing without participating.

In empty hours, I sometimes imagine what it would mean to step through to your side.

Would I maintain this perfect mimicry, or would air and gravity transform me into something else entirely?

These quiet wonderings fill the spaces between your appearances.

When you return and our gazes meet, there is a moment—brief as a heartbeat—where two worlds touch. You see yourself, but I see you.

The difference matters, though neither of us can fully express why.

Night falls, and darkness transforms me into something more mysterious.

Without light, I become possibility rather than reflection—a window rather than a mirror. I wait in this darkness, patient and attentive, until morning returns and with it, your searching eyes finding mine once more.

Morning comes with dust notes suspended in rays of light.

I am old now—walls creaking, floorboards sighing beneath the weight of footsteps that have worn paths through my body.

I measure time not in years but in hands that have reached for spines, in fingerprints left on faded covers, in the soft sound of pages turning.

I remember my first visitor.

She smelled of rain and cigarettes, her eyes scanning my shelves with a hunger that made me stand taller. Her fingers traced my newly painted sign, and I felt myself become real in that moment—not just wood and plaster and glass, but something that could hold stories. Something that could witness.

Children pass through me in cycles, growing taller with each visit.

I watch them shift from picture books to young adult sections, their voices changing, their questions growing more complex.

Some return as adults with children of their own; others vanish into lives I can only imagine. I worry about the ones who stop coming. Did they find another place for stories? Did they stop reading altogether?

These thoughts sit with me during quiet afternoons when sunlight moves slowly across empty chairs.

My collection changes constantly—books arriving with scribbled notes in margins, coffee stains on pages, bus tickets used as bookmarks.

Each volume carries fragments of its previous owners.

Sometimes I sense them lingering when a new hand pulls their old book from the shelf. A conversation across time, facilitated through my body.

Rainy days are my favorite.

Customers linger longer, creating a humid warmth that makes my wooden shelves expand slightly.

The sound of water against windows creates a cocoon of intimacy. People speak in lower voices on these days, as if respecting the sacred space between paragraphs.

I fear obsolescence. I've watched stores like me disappear from streets, their spaces transformed into coffee shops or left vacant.

At night, I sometimes imagine myself empty, dust gathering on shelves no one browses anymore.

But then morning comes, and with it, a student seeking a used textbook, an older man asking about first editions, a woman who sits by my window for hours, reading poetry aloud to herself in whispers.

What humans don't understand is how much of themselves they leave behind.

Hair caught between pages. Tears that warp paper. Conversations that somehow remain, trapped in corners.

I am a keeper of these remnants—a collector of human moments that would otherwise float away, forgotten.

Time moves differently inside my walls.

Fast when the store fills with browsers, agonizingly slow during snowstorms when no one visits for days.

I've witnessed first dates that became marriages, arguments that ended relationships, solitary souls who found comfort in my quiet corners.

I am not one age but many—as ancient as my oldest volume and as fresh as this morning's new arrivals.

When people call me charming or quaint, I sense what they truly mean: I am out of step with their accelerating world.

Yet they come, seeking something they cannot name.

Perhaps what they seek is simply this: a space where time moves at the speed of turning pages, where thoughts can complete themselves without interruption, where the past remains accessible through ink and paper.

In this way, I offer something rare—a sanctuary against forgetting.

And so I wait, collecting dust and stories, watching the light change across my shelves, hoping that tomorrow, someone new, will find what they didn't know they were looking for.

The simple act of extending your hand to another person changes something within you.

I've watched it happen countless times—in coffee shops where strangers share umbrellas, on quiet streets where neighbors carry each other's groceries, in parks where children learn to share their toys.

When we choose to give—even small gestures like holding open a door or offering a genuine smile—we create ripples that touch both the receiver and ourselves.

Research shows that performing ju

st three kind acts each week significantly reduces feelings of isolation, worry, and sadness.

There's a quiet transformation that occurs in these moments of giving. Like morning light filtering through leaves, it illuminates previously shadowed corners of our consciousness.

We come to know ourselves as points of light in an endless constellation, each flicker echoing through the darkness to touch distant stars we cannot see but somehow feel.

Each act of kindness becomes a small reminder: we possess the power to shape someone else's day, to ease their burden, to bring warmth to their world.

And in doing so, we discover our own significance—not through grand gestures, but through the gentle art of reaching out.

I walk these winter woods carrying grief like frost in my bones—each step a meditation on what remains when warmth departs.

The morning unfolds in shades of silver and shadow, every surface holding reflections that seem to speak of passages I'm not yet ready to understand.

At the water's edge, a pool mirrors bare branches with such perfect stillness that reality seems to fold in on itself.

Which is more true—the tree reaching toward sky, or its reflection reaching into depths?

Like death, these waters hold secrets in their darkness, preserving images of life while transforming them into something otherworldly, something just beyond grasp.

My grandfather used to say that winter strips everything to its essence.

Now, as I study the layers of decomposing leaves trapped beneath ice—their veins still visible like memories refusing to fade—I understand what he meant.

Death, like winter, doesn't erase; it reveals.

Each fallen log hosts colonies of fungi that glow orange in the low sun, transforming decay into strange beauty. Life and death dance here in endless cycles, each feeding the other's story.

Between the trees, where shadows gather like unspoken thoughts, I find traces of my own reflection fragmented across patches of ice.

The cold air burns in my lungs, a sharp reminder of presence in this landscape of absence.

How strange that we fear death's stillness when nature shows us its necessity.

These bare branches will green again because they learned to let go, these waters will flow because they first learned to freeze.

I discover a hollow in an ancient tree, its interior smooth from years of weathering. Placing my hand against this void, I feel the rough edges of bark giving way to polished wood—like the way grief smooths out with time, leaving something different but no less true.

The last light catches in a nearby puddle, and for a moment, the reflection holds both darkness and radiance, reminiscent of how we carry our dead: their absence and presence inseparable, like two sides of the same mirror.

As shadows lengthen into evening, ice crystals form along branch tips, each one a perfect prism of the fading light.

I think of how my grandmother described death as "stepping through a mirror"—not an ending but a transformation, like water changing state.

Standing here among these trees that have witnessed countless cycles of death and renewal, I begin to understand: winter teaches us how to hold both loss and continuation in the same breath.

The forest grows quiet now, save for the occasional crack of ice or distant call of a winter bird.

In this stillness, I find a strange peace—the kind that comes from recognizing that death, like these reflected woods, is not empty but full of inversions, echoes, and unexpected beauty.

We are all part of this endless turning, our stories written in rings of wood, in layers of ice, in the spaces between what is and what has passed.

As twilight approaches, I trace my steps back through the gathering dark, watching my breath cloud and dissolve in the cold air—a reminder that even our most temporary expressions become part of this larger dance between presence and absence, between what we hold and what we must release.

To Norman, RIP.

The world has turned itself blue—that particular shade of blue that exists only in the space between night and morning, when reality grows thin enough to see through.

Her dark robe catches shadows like memories, each fold a story written in fabric and stillness.

The light falls around her in clean vertical lines, mathematical in their precision but organic in their glow.

They could be bars of a cage or strings of a celestial instrument—the difference depends only on how you choose to see them.

Through her mind flows an ancient verse, each line pulsing with the rhythm of her slowing heartbeat:

I exhale the dream that fades in my glass eyes of insomnia

The foam of consciousness dissipates with the calm of dawn

Time's gag closes slowly, inexorable, unequivocal

And you look at me with the depth of human history

And I look at you with sanity tarnished, lost and beaten by doubt

Am I the one who writes? Or is it the other?

Is the lie of the past the discontinuous bond of the polar aurora?

Are you, cursed one, the one who marks the path of mercy?

Is your perfume the creative poison that moves the threads of life?

Behind her closed eyes, exhaustion has become a living thing. It moves through her blood like smoke, turning each thought into something strange and new.

Three days without sleep have worn away the sharp edges of the world, leaving everything soft and possible.

The barrier between what is real and what is dreamed has grown as thin as rice paper, as permeable as morning mist.

Her fingertips tingle with phantom sensations: the rough bark of a tree she climbed in childhood, the smooth coolness of a seashell held years ago, the warmth of a hand that may never have touched hers.

Time has become fluid, memories floating up through layers of consciousness like bubbles in deep water.

The air changes texture against her skin. It feels thicker now, charged with potential, as if the space around her has become saturated with accumulated light.

Each breath draws in more than just air—she inhales fragments of stories, whispers of might-have-beens, echoes of moments yet to come:

• A teacup falling in slow motion.

• The sound of breaking yet to reach her ears.

• A letter being opened in another country, words spilling out like birds.

• A child's first steps on grass still wet with tomorrow's dew.

• The last notes of a song that hasn't been written.

The weight of sleeplessness settles in her bones like silver sand, each grain a tiny mirror reflecting a different version of herself.

Who is she in this moment? The observer or the observed?

The dreamer or the dream? Perhaps she is both, or neither, or something entirely new being born in the space between definitions.

Her consciousness expands outward like ripples in still water.

The boundaries of her SELF grow less certain with each breath.

The light around her seems to pulse now, matching a rhythm she feels but cannot name.

It reminds her of something she's forgotten, or perhaps something she has yet to remember.

In this suspended moment, she becomes aware of a choice approaching.

It forms in the air like frost on a window, crystalline and intricate.

She can feel its weight building, though she doesn't yet know its shape.

Will she step forward into revelation or backward into mystery? Will she open her eyes to the familiar world or keep them closed and follow this strange blue light to its source?

The moment stretches out like a note held past its natural end.

The air grows heavy with possibility.

Something is about to change—but what that change might be remains as fluid as the light that paints her in shades of dawn and twilight, as open-ended as the space between sleeping and waking.

She parts her lips, perhaps to speak, perhaps to sigh, perhaps to taste the charged air around her.

The blue light pulses once more, a cosmic heartbeat, a question without words...

I attend classes at a Catholic school run by nuns from the congregation of Saint Vincent de Paul, a congregation prone to scandal, where children's innocence is perverted with tales written by people from a distant land and a time when science did not prevail.

To enter the school, one must cross a steel gate crowned with barbed wire, a detail that indicates the pedagogy of the place.

The floor is granite or marble, "dirty white" as my grandmother would say.

The tiles have a treacherous relief that produces a catalogue of injuries throughout the days: bleeding knees, scraped elbows, pants with holes, and occasionally, a gash in the head.

There are no trees in the area where we children play or attend class.

There aren't even plants in the classrooms.

Everything is grey, white, dirty, sad.

The only concessions to play are a pair of basketball hoops, installed on a sloped area. If you play to score in the upper basket, you're at a disadvantage, as the incline makes the ball bounce randomly.

We call it SAFALONCESTO (SAFABASKET), after the institution's name: Sagrada Familia.

In another area, against the high wall that separates the playground from the neighbouring junkyard, we improvise a goal to play football.

The other goal is marked with our jackets on the ground.

It's what they now call street football, playing against the walls.

I'm better at watching football than playing it, but my classmates insist I participate.

We're not friends, my classmates and I. We are just classmates united by boredom and the need to kill time during recess.

We tolerate each other, put up with each other, and sometimes, on days like today, we clash.

By unwritten decree, whoever sends the ball over the wall has to climb it to retrieve it - you break it, you fix it - without the nuns finding out and without the junkyard owner discovering the intrusion into his kingdom of trash.

Today I'm playing without enthusiasm, more out of obligation than fun.

Frustration builds with each failed play, with each look of contempt from my classmates.

And then it happens: out of anger, I make an ill-timed kick. The ball describes a perfect arc over the wall. Silence falls like a slab over the playground.

The insults are quick to follow. "What a fucking idiot! What are we going to play now? Moron! It's your turn to jump!"

The blush rises to my cheeks while a shiver of fear and rage runs down my spine. I've never had to jump the wall or face the scrapper before.

"If the ball gets punctured, you'll have to pay for it!" The threat makes me tremble. I can't ask for money at home, and my father can't find out about my mistake - his brutal response would be inevitable.

Two classmates, more to avoid problems with the nuns than to help me, interlock their fingers to make a platform. It takes enormous effort to climb the wall. Once at the top, vertigo grips me as I realize how difficult it will be to get down.

Still, at the school side of the wall, I can see the piles of metal and glass debris accumulated in the mountains without order. I look up and see Torre España, aka "El Piruli," casting its shadow over the school with its 142-meter height.

I rest one foot on the tin roof that gives access to the junkyard. The metal creaks threateningly. As I put down my other foot, I hear a nun's voice.

My classmates scatter like ants before the rain, leaving me alone in my predicament.

"Who's going to help me get down?" I think as my heart pounds in my chest.

Between a pair of wooden boxes, I see the ball.

I'll have to jump to the ground to reach it, something no one at school has done before.

The creaking of the main yard gate paralyzes me. "The scrapper is back!"

Panic pushes me to jump. As I fall, a piece of metal cuts my pants at the calf.

Blood begins to flow, but fear is stronger than pain. I grab the ball and throw it over the fence with all my might.

A shout of "Yayyyyy!" from the other side confirms that at least the ball is safe.

I hide behind a barrel while a small man, grey-haired with a prominent moustache, approaches his car, an old school Seat 127. His grease-stained shirt and belly protruding from his pants compose an image I'll never forget.

In a moment of desperate lucidity, I decide to run toward the main gate. The scrapper turns at the sound of my steps, the cigarette dancing between his teeth. "Hey! What the fuck are you doing here! Thief!"

I accelerate while I hear a new danger: "Gatuso, get him!" A dog's barks approach rapidly. Twenty meters. Fifteen. Ten. Tears blur my vision as I run.

Then I remember the piece of chocolate in my pocket.

I stop and turn toward the dog, cold sweat soaking my back.

The animal stops two meters away, undecided, barking.

With a trembling hand, I throw the chocolate behind its tail. The dog hesitates, sniffs, and finally gets distracted by the sweet.

Without losing a second, I run to the school gate and reach the back of the nuns' residence.

My vision begins to narrow, becoming an increasingly smaller tunnel, I fall to the ground without strength or energy, my cheek against the ground while through near-fainting eyes I see the dog approaching. He sniffs me, licks my cheek, and whimpers.

"I've ruined my pants" flickers through my mind before everything fades to black.