Time lost meaning.
Days, or maybe only breaths, passed as he drifted between broken sleep and jagged waking. The names circled him like vultures—one old, one new. Each whispered in a different tongue, each clawed for dominance inside his skull.
Sometimes he felt himself hollow, a shell already emptied. Other times he felt swollen, as though too many selves pressed into one body, crowding, choking, suffocating.
His parents' voices carried the new name again and again, insistent, rhythmic, until it began to beat like a drum against his chest. Not mine, he tried to say. Not me. Yet his infant lips only drooled, his voice nothing but meaningless coos.
Helplessness dug deeper. His body was a prison without locks, only walls too thick to break.
Shadows of memory flickered—gray mornings, subway brakes, the stink of instant noodles left too long. They seemed smaller each time they came, as if distance was swallowing them whole. He reached for them with everything he had, but his fingers met only smoke.
The fear was no longer simple. It was layered. The terror of being trapped in weakness. The horror of being renamed. The dread that soon—very soon—he would forget he had ever been someone else at all.
And yet—what if resisting was worse? What if clinging too tightly meant shattering, leaving nothing behind but a mad husk, a baby who screamed without end?
The question hollowed him out. Each time he drifted toward sleep, the answer whispered: You cannot win.
He wept, though no one understood it. He thrashed, though it changed nothing. He prayed, though he knew no god was listening.
And then—just as his mind threatened to splinter under its own weight—something foreign brushed against him.
Not a word. Not a memory. Something deeper. A presence, like a pulse beneath the skin of the world, faint but undeniable.
It was there. Watching. Waiting.
And the moment he sensed it, he wished he hadn't.