Arin had stopped counting the nights he woke up screaming. Sometimes the scream stayed trapped in his throat, a strangled silence that tore at his lungs; other times, it escaped, echoing through the alleys until even the rats fled. Sleep was never rest—it was another battlefield where the past clawed at him like an animal that refused to die.
In those dreams, his uncle returned. The room was always locked, the air suffocating, and Arin was once again a boy, voiceless, powerless. But when he opened his eyes, the nightmare did not leave him. The faces of strangers blurred into his abuser's, the sound of doors clicking shut in cafés or stations sent his pulse hammering. Even the brush of a hand in the market made his skin recoil, as if the world itself were conspiring to remind him that he was never safe.
He had tried once to drown these memories in liquor. The burn of alcohol had been a temporary fire, numbing his flesh but never his mind. By the third bottle, he had fallen to the floor and wept—not because he was drunk, but because he realized the liquor would never wash him clean. There was no cleansing, only carrying.
And so he carried.
Eira often found him sitting in silence, staring at nothing. She did not press him with questions; she simply sat beside him, scribbling in her notebook. But that silence between them was not empty—it was charged, a space where Arin's suffering breathed without being judged.
One night, as dusk painted the square in rust and ash, she asked softly:
"Arin, what is the heaviest thing you carry?"
He thought of hunger, of blood, of his mother's hollow face, of his uncle's hands, of nights spent fighting rats for food. But none of these were the heaviest. He lowered his head and whispered:
"The heaviest thing is that I still want to love this world."
The words shocked even him. He hadn't meant to confess them. They felt like a betrayal of everything he had endured, and yet, they were true. Despite cruelty, despite abuse, despite betrayal—something in him still longed to believe in tenderness, in the possibility of being seen without being used.
Eira's hand trembled slightly as she wrote his words down. She didn't look at him when she replied:
"Perhaps that longing is what the world fears most. Not your pain, not your scars, but that you can still want to love it."
For days after, Arin could not shake the thought. He began to wonder if his endurance was not just defiance, but a kind of weapon—an unspoken rebellion against the cruelty that had shaped him. And yet, alongside that thought came another, darker one:
*If the world took everything from me and still I long to love it, then maybe love itself is the last cruelty.*
The idea gnawed at him, dangerous, consuming.
One evening, when the square was nearly empty, Arin returned to find Eira absent. Instead, her notebook lay on the bench where she always sat. He hesitated, then picked it up.
The cover was worn, the pages soft with use. Most of it was filled with questions, written in her sharp, delicate script:
*What is pain without witness?*
*Does endurance mean strength, or does it mean no one came to save you?*
*What is the difference between cruelty and indifference?*
But near the end of the notebook, the questions changed. They were darker. Angrier.
*How much more can he endure?*
*What happens when the garden becomes a graveyard?*
*When does suffering stop being philosophy and become prophecy?*
Arin's hands shook as he turned the pages, until finally he reached the very last one.
There, written not in neat handwriting but in frantic strokes, was a single line:
*Arin, when you remember what really happened, will you still sit beside me?"**
The notebook fell from his hands.
What did she mean? *What really happened?*
Arin's memories, fractured and bleeding, suddenly felt less certain. Had he misremembered his past? Or worse—had he forgotten something so cruel that even his own mind had buried it?
The question burned inside him like fire, and for the first time in years, Arin was not only haunted by his suffering—he was terrified of what he might still uncover.