No shell to break, no yolk of warmth.
Only a hush — dense and echoless —
where time forgot to pass and memory dared to form.
It shimmered at the edge of erasure,
a soft rupture between almost and was.
From that breathless seam: a feather.
Not white, not clean — but grey, streaked in the ash of unspoken names.
The memory arrived long before the bird.
It perched where grief sleeps:
beneath the skin of strangers,
inside half-remembered rooms,
in the pause before someone says “I used to…”
It had no body, only intent.
No eyes, but it saw.
No name, but it listened for one.
And somewhere —
a current stirred.
The perimeter formed.
It wasn’t boundary so much as refusal:
a resistance to forgetting.
The first contour of Self,
drawn not in blood or bone, but in need.
The memory realized it was alone.
That was the moment it began to exist.
It moved.
Not forward — inward.
Drawn toward warmth not felt but imagined.
It clung to fragments like branches:
It wrapped these around its becoming.
They did not protect it.
They remembered it.
But the architecture of memory is guarded.
There are thresholds,
and gatekeepers wearing the face of survival.
“Do not go back,” they whisper.
“There is nothing there but ache.”
Still — the bird fell.
Not as punishment, but as gravity.
Memory has its own physics.
It descended.
Through skylines made of half-lit windows.
Through the hum of static radios.
Into a childhood mistaken for sanctuary.
The room was smaller than recall.
The dragon on the ceiling crack no longer breathed.
Dust lay like snow on the remnants:
a chair once spun in, a book never finished.
But the nest was not empty.
It was filled with absence.
And something darker.
A voice lived here.
Unseen.
It did not shout — it pronounced.
“You do not belong in the remembering.”
The bird heard, and trembled.
Not in fear. In forming.
It pushed back.
With no claws. No cry.
Just persistence.
And from the pressure came the first real thing:
A wing-shiver.
Not flight.
But the promise of it.
By morning, the nurses whispered.
Room 213 had stirred.
Not the man. Not his eyes.
But the monitor blinked a single line.
The kind of noise that means maybe.
On the floor:
a single feather.
Grey. Bent.
Still warm.
And in his sleep, the man said a name.
Not his own. Not hers. But one the wind had been trying to return.