There are moments in life when time fractures, not with the violent shatter of glass, but with the soft unravelling of a thread pulled too tight. It begins in silence. A pause between heartbeats. A flicker of something unseen brushes the inside of the skin. For me, it started with a resonance I couldn’t name, but felt as certain as certain can be. As if something, or someone, had struck a tuning fork inside my chest.
I was walking along the street when it happened, past people with their eyes fixed and invisible burdens, when I felt you. Not the you that is skin and voice and name, but the you beneath all that. The core. The essence. The pulse I recognised before I even turned to look.
We didn’t speak, not then. Not speaking, talking about stuff, but something aligned. Like stars across space. Like atoms arranged into meaning. My steps faltered, not the steps of walking, the steps of self-confidence. But I kept moving, unsure if I imagined it. Still, the echo remained. I carried it with me like a quiet ache.
Inside, something had begun to stir. Something vast.
But here is the truth I haven’t spoken, not even to myself: that beneath the surface of that moment, beneath the beauty of recognition, lay a chasm carved by fear. The kind of fear that doesn’t announce itself with panic, but with doubt. Doubt that I deserved to be seen. Doubt that I would be known and then left behind.
This is not a love story. Not yet.
This is the story of a soul trying to remember its worth through the eyes of another, a tale of energy too powerful to be denied yet trapped within the reactor of an uncertain self.
And maybe, just maybe, this is the beginning of something breaking free.
I’ve always wondered how something invisible could weigh so much. The fear. The silence. The thoughts that never cross the threshold of my lips. It’s a strange kind of gravity, one that bends light inward until nothing escapes. And lately, it’s been stronger.
After that day, your day, I kept retracing my steps. Not literally, not the walking kind, but in my mind. Again and again, like a scientist rewinding footage of an unexplained phenomenon. A glitch in the world’s code. I thought maybe I’d imagined the moment. That my mind, starved for connection, had conjured you out of need. But then the dreams started.
You came in fragments. A shoulder brushed past mine. A voice I couldn’t quite hear. A presence that lingered just beyond the veil of waking. Not menacing, not angelic, just there. Familiar. Like something I once knew and forgot on purpose.
I considered keeping a notebook, something I have never done before. I called it the Core, a place to pour the fragments, to sketch the dreams, to give shape to the unspoken.
Entry One:
You are a frequency I can’t stop tuning into. Even in silence, you speak to something within me I don’t understand. I’m remembering you, not creating you?
I do not tell anyone. They wouldn’t understand. I’m not sure I do either. But the energy inside me, that atom-splitting, tectonic-rattling force, was growing. It wasn’t just emotional anymore. It was physical. I’d wake up with my pulse racing, palms tingling, breath caught like it was waiting for a signal.
One night, as I lay in the dark, I whispered aloud, “Where are you?”
I didn’t expect an answer.
But I swear, I ‘felt’ one.
Not in words. But in ‘pull’. As if the world had turned its face toward me for just a second. And smiled.
There is a place, inside me, I go to when the noise inside me grows too loud. It’s not on any map, and yet I find my way there with unerring instinct. Tucked at the back of a bookstore where the books no one reads are, behind a door no one else seems to notice, is a space that does not quite obey the rules of physics.
The first time I stepped inside, the strangeness of it struck me, how it felt both expansive and intimate, like a secret whispered across centuries. The room has no corners. The walls curve gently into one another, soft and seamless, as if space itself has chosen to be kind.
I sit cross-legged on the soft floor, surrounded by books that have no words, that don’t belong to any genre, spines unmarked, but full of knowledge. There’s no assistant. No register. Just a gentle hum, like the air is alive with potential.
Now, the hum feels stronger. Electric. My fingers twitch as I reach into my pocket and pull out the Core, the notebook that’s becoming more confession than journal. More exciting than scepticism, More truth than fiction.
Today I write:
Entry seven:
I keep feeling you in places you shouldn’t be. In the reflection of a window, in the static anticipation before music begins, in the scent of petrichor where there’s no rain. Either I’m losing my mind, or you’re trying to tell me something.
Just as I finish writing, I notice a slip of paper squeezed in the pages towards the back of the book, that I had forgotten I had placed there before. My heart stumbles as I reach for it. I don’t recall what I wrote on it, but I feel compelled to see it. There’s no name, no mark. Just a single phrase written in delicate black ink:
“The thread never forgets.”
I freeze.
The words vibrate. Not with sound, but with memory. Something ancient and aching stirs in my chest. A deep resonance. The same one I felt the first time I sensed you.
I look around the room. Empty. Or so it seems.
My hands are shaking. Not out of fear, but recognition.
This is not a coincidence.
This is an invitation.
It didn’t happen all at once.
There was no beam of light. No celestial voice. No sudden clarity that washed everything clean.
It came slowly, like mist lifting after a long night. Like the body remembering how to breathe after holding tension for years. Like the soft echo of a name you haven’t spoken in ages, but that still fits in your mouth like it was never gone.
The thread was real. Not like the ones we find randomly on our clothes after they have been laundered, but the one running through me, through all of this. It was never about finding you, not really. It was about remembering me.
The me before the fear.
The me before I believed I had to be smaller to be safe.
The me who enjoyed life, full of fun.
The me who didn’t yet doubt that I belonged to something infinite.
I sat in silence and closed my eyes, not to escape but to return, to descend into the quiet place beneath thought, beneath identity, where language ends and knowing begins.
There, in the stillness, I felt it.
Not a person. Not even a presence.
A field. A warmth. A memory of being held, not by arms, but by existence itself.
I saw no visions. I heard no voice.
But something opened. And in the opening, I remembered:
I am not broken.
I am not separate.
I am the thread, and the hand that holds it.
I am the echo, and the voice that calls.
I am the silence, and the pulse beneath it.
I am the watcher behind the eyes.
And I have always been.
Tears came, softly, without sorrow, just the gentle breaking of the shell I’d mistaken for myself.
When I opened my eyes, the world hadn’t changed.
But I had.
The fear still lives somewhere inside me, but it no longer leads. The thread has woven me back into the fabric of everything, and I no longer fight to be found. I am found.
And now, when the static hum returns, I don’t brace against it.
I listen.
I welcome the remembering.
Because now I know:
The thread of life never forgets.
And neither will I.
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