A year passed, and it left its mark like a scar etched across my skin. Every day I counted became a wound I knew too well—birthdays, mornings, the hush of the market—each cut stitched into the same quiet ache. The world spun on, tireless and indifferent, and I moved with it out of habit, not purpose, a shadow following someone who no longer walked.
I thought grief would settle into shape—rituals, words spoken aloud, the steady loosening of pain. Instead, it tangled itself into me so finely I could not tell where it ended and I began. I searched for meaning the way one searches for a shop on an empty street: sometimes a faint glow behind glass, sometimes only darkness, dust, and locked doors.
"I must find myself," I whispered to empty rooms. But the words dissolved the moment they left my lips. I was searching and not-searching, present and absent at once: a mind clawing at purpose, a body that craved numbness. If the self was a road, mine stretched out unfinished—footsteps that began and vanished, leading both nowhere and everywhere.
Days blurred, muffled by small routines meant to hold back the tide. I rose with the rooster, took neighbors' chores, lingered in markets where other people's faces became borrowed distractions. When asked how I was, I smiled and lied, "I'm fine," though my chest still remembered the weight of his hand. The words were antiseptic, smooth, useful lies.
At night the questions returned, sharper, merciless.Who am I, now that the one who steadied me is gone?What do I do with hands built for work when the work feels hollow?Does purpose wait to be discovered, or does it choose the seeker?
Sometimes, strange answers came—half riddles, half signs. A bird I had never seen perched on our fence and stared as though it carried judgment. A pocket watch of my father's surfaced in a forgotten coat, its hands frozen at three. For a moment the world folded, and I swore I heard his breath as if he were only sleeping. But when I opened the case, there was no hidden note—only dust and silence, impenetrable.
Dreams began to visit like wary guests. Rooms flooded and shifted; doors opened onto more doors; my father's hands shaped clay that dissolved into air. I woke with salt on my lips, certain that what I sought was not one answer but a labyrinth of doors, each leading deeper into mystery.
People offered me torches of certainty—"Time heals," "Move on," "Work harder." But their light illuminated only corners, leaving the rest in shadow. Inside, something resisted simplification. I had been raised to hold contradictions—humility and pride, silence and defiance. How could I now live by a single tidy explanation?
So I obeyed logic, patched fences, cooked for the hungry, taught children letters. These tasks warmed me, briefly, but the warmth always guttered like a candle before an ocean. The greater questions returned, patient as ghosts.
Why must goodness be performed if it does not mend the hollow?Was my father's endurance a map, or only an echo?By living this way, do I honor him, or betray him?
Hope sometimes flickered—a cousin's letter, a stranger's laughter—but so too did darker clarity. Nights when I walked the path we once shared, imagining his figure beside me, and finding only a silence so deep it felt like the world holding its breath.
Whispers grew in the village. They said grief had turned me into an unread book, a puzzle too strange to touch. I did not mind. Pity was still a form of attention; indifference was the truer death.
And there were the small mysteries: a light pulsing on the hill at odd hours, footprints that belonged to no one, a tune hummed by no lips drifting through my window before dawn. Each felt like a breadcrumb from some other life—invitation or trick, I could not say.
In the deepest hours, I asked the dark—Is this truly the life I am meant to live? Is he waiting beyond this grief, or must I carve my own path even if it breaks beneath me? The silence gave no words, only sensations: a sunbeam splitting through a crack, the stubborn tick of a broken watch, the steady rhythm of my own breath. They told me to keep moving, not to arrive.
So I walked. Not toward, not away—simply to keep from being swallowed whole. Each step was both a loss and a claim. My father's watch sat in my pocket, its hands fixed forever at three, while I learned to listen for my own quiet cadence.
If I was lost, then I would remain a seeker—mysterious to the world, and mysterious back. I would gather light from odd corners, listen to the wind for voices, let the unanswered questions become my lantern.
At the close of the year, beneath a sky swollen with stars, I sat on the roof and let the cold air burn my face. For the first time, my heart loosened its grip on anger and sorrow. What came instead was a fragile curiosity. The world had given me no answers, only permission—to keep searching.
And so I went on. Unsteady, unsure, but alive, carrying mystery like a pulse inside my chest.