PATIENT ECHOES – Entry 2
"Language is more than communication. It is the net we cast over the abyss to prove we still exist.
Without words, thought frays. Without names, the self crumbles.
Today, I tried to write mine, but the letters refused to hold shape. I watched my name scatter across the page like startled birds.
Who is the man in this cellar?
I do not know him.
I do not even know the word I."
—S.N.
---
There came a night when I forgot the shape of my name.
I had written it so many times—on ledger margins, on dusty crates, in the ink-bled corners of old invoices. But now, when I reached for it, it slipped through my mind like smoke. No syllables came, no letters formed behind my eyes. Only the hollow throb of absence.
It was not frightening at first.
Just... quiet.
A kind of silence more complete than anything I had yet known—beyond the cellar's hush, beyond the hush of the dead vineyard above. This silence lived in me. Pooled in the hollow where thought used to be.
The pen sat on its side, uncapped. The last words I'd written had started to fade, their lines gone soft with time and moisture. I tried to read them again, but they resisted meaning. Curled into themselves like the legs of dying spiders.
I no longer understood them.
I no longer understood language.
Not fully, not fluently. Syntax came unspooled. Vocabulary fractured into isolated symbols—broken glass across the floor of my mind. I could see words, remember their forms—but the order had decayed. The logic behind them had evaporated, and what remained was instinct.
I tried to say something aloud.
Just to hear my voice.
But the sound that came out was low and shapeless, more vibration than speech. A scrape of breath from an animal's throat. My tongue didn't shape consonants correctly anymore, and the vowels dragged like chains. The effort of it startled me.
I stepped back from my own voice as though it were a stranger's.
Was this madness?
Or was I finally... adjusting?
---
I stopped writing that week.
There was no point. The page stared at me with quiet disdain, filled with marks that had once been tools and now seemed like ruins—relics of a language whose worshippers had long since died.
I found myself pacing instead. Slowly at first, a circuit between the farthest walls. Then faster, then in spirals. My fingers brushed the stone until the skin wore smooth. I counted the cracks in the mortar with my toes. I tracked the movement of the dust, the path of the spider weaving its web near the light-slit.
Some part of me thought: Observe, and anchor yourself to reality. You are still a thinking being.
But I no longer trusted the part of me that thought.
Thought was memory.
Memory was story.
And story was made of language.
And I was losing it all.
---
There were moments—sharp, bladed moments—when instinct surged in place of reason.
Once, I tore apart a wine crate without knowing why. My hands splintered the wood in seconds. I crouched over the remains like a starving thing, tasting resin and cork with the back of my throat.
Another time, I hissed at the reflection of my own arm in the metal hinge of the trapdoor, unsure if it was mine or some other presence threatening to steal from me.
My hunger no longer made arguments, it demanded. It moved through me like weather—sudden and absolute.
I caught myself one night curled in the corner, spine against stone, knees tight to my chest. My mouth opened and closed rhythmically, no sound escaping, but the motion continued for hours. Rocking, and swaying. Trying to remember what it meant to be still.
Stillness had once belonged to human things: meditation, rest, restraint.
Now it belonged to predators, waiting in grass.
I was learning that difference by forgetting everything else.
---
How many days passed? I couldn't say.
Time itself seemed to dissolve.
I stopped keeping count after I found the tally I'd been carving into the cellar wall—dozens of strokes, crossed and double-crossed, overlapping like prison bars. But I didn't remember making the last few rows. They looked like someone else's script, someone less careful.
I stared at them for a long time, head tilted, and then dragged my nail through the stone until the marks blurred. I didn't want time anymore. Time was for the before. This was the after, and it did not care about calendars.
I existed between pulses of instinct.
Smell. Sound. Stillness.
Smell. Sound. Hunger.
Hunger.
Always hunger.
---
And yet—buried in the fugue—something delicate remained.
A thread, fragile, and nearly invisible.
Sometimes, when I closed my eyes, I still saw faces. My mother brushing dust from the glass of a wedding photo. Adrien, the boy from the clinic, hiding behind his hands and whispering, Tu ne peux pas me voir.
And someone—though I had not yet named him. Not here, not in this life. But he existed still in the folds of memory, like the taste of a dream I couldn't quite swallow.
These were not hallucinations.
They were anchors.
I clung to them in moments of lucidity, when the fog thinned just enough for a name to form—not my own, not yet, but a shape. A silhouette in the dark.
Not a monster, not quite.
Not yet.
---
One night—I don't know what stirred me—I stood beneath the shaft of moonlight that split the cellar. It made my skin glitter faintly, like dust caught in resin. I raised a hand, turned it palm up. The bones beneath the flesh looked sculpted, fine as marble.
I tried again to say a word.
Any word.
And this time, I managed one:
"Je…"
It fell apart after that, no noun followed. No self.
But the attempt marked something, a ripple and a start.
I pressed my forehead to the stone and whispered the syllable again.
Not because it had meaning now, but because meaning might come back.
Because sound might carve a path out of this night.
A night without language.
But not without hope.
I was losing who I had been—but perhaps, if I held on to that single vowel, that fractured breath—
I could shape what I would become.
Not a man, and not a beast.
But something between,
Something that endures.