The staircase was empty.Not unusually so — I was te, which meant the rest of the school had already been swallowed by cssrooms and roll calls. My footsteps echoed against the bare concrete, each one a little too loud in the silence. Through the window on the nding, I caught a glimpse of the field below. A couple of students were still out there, moving without any particur urgency.

  I guess they're going to bunk

  The hallway on the second floor was worse. Completely still, the kind of silence that felt deliberate, like the building itself was holding its breath. I could hear every detail of my own movement — the faint scuff of my shoes, the rustle of my bag against my shoulder. From somewhere down the corridor, muffled and distant, came the voice of my homeroom teacher.I slowed down at the door."May I come in, ma'am?"

  The moment the words left my mouth, I felt it — that specific, unpleasant weight of an entire css turning to look at you at the same time. Thirty pairs of eyes, all arriving at once.

  Mrs. Xara stood at the front of the room, a marker loosely held in one hand. She regarded me for a moment with an expression that wasn't quite a smile and wasn't quite a warning — something that lived precisely in between. Her bck hair fell partially over her face, half-veiling eyes that were an unusual shade of green, and there was something in the way she carried herself, even standing still, that made the air around her feel slightly formal. Like you were always one wrong word away from being corrected."Come in," she said.

  I did, keeping my eyes forward, doing my best to pretend I couldn't feel the entire css tracking me to my seat. I found my spot in the st row and sat down.

  "Good morning, Rio." Mia's voice came from my right, barely above a whisper."Hey. Good morning.""You're te again?" She turned to look at me, eyes narrowing slightly. "Don't tell me you just overslept.""No," I said, and ughed quietly. "I was just taking my time."

  She held the look for a second longer than necessary before turning back to face the board. That was very Sia — she never let things go without registering her opinion, even if that opinion was just a narrowed gnce. As far as I could remember, she had always been like this. Watchful. Quietly protective in a way she never announced but never quite hid either.I shifted my attention to the front of the css.

  Lonely.

  That was the word that surfaced, unbidden, the way it sometimes did when things were too quiet. It was the first word I could clearly remember feeling when I first became aware of myself in this world.Everything had been blurry then. Shapes without names, voices without faces I could pce. I hadn't understood what was happening — not at first. It felt like being dropped into the middle of a story that had been running without me, expected to know all the characters, all the context, all the rules.

  Thousands of faces and not a single one I recognized.

  It had been suffocating. My head had felt like it was going to split open from the pressure of it. I had been weak, disoriented, barely holding myself together. All I could do was exist in that body and feel how wrong it felt — how thin and foreign and not-mine everything was.Sia and my mother had been terrified. I could see it on them, in the way they moved around me carefully, like they were afraid of making a wrong step. But I couldn't bring myself to care about that. Not then. I had been too consumed by one single, desperate impulse.I need to get out of this body.

  But then something had shifted. Not gradually — suddenly, like a thread snapping.Why am I running away?This could be a new start.I can build a life here. But... what was my old life?

  That was when the real torture had begun. Not the confusion, not the disorientation — those I could have eventually managed. It was the trying to remember that broke me. I had thrown everything I had at it, reaching back for something, anything — a name, a face, a feeling — and found nothing. A bnk wall in every direction.I couldn't remember who I had been.

  I didn't leave my room for days. I'm not sure how many. The light changed outside the window and I watched it change and did nothing else. The woman who was apparently my mother came every day without fail, knocking gently before she entered, sitting close without crowding me.

  "Are you okay, dear?""Did something happen?""Are you not feeling well?"

  Her concern was so genuine it hurt to look at directly. I had felt worthless under it — like something broken being handled with care it didn't deserve.And then, one afternoon, there was a different knock. Lighter. A different rhythm.

  "Are you okay, Rio?"

  It was the first time I had heard my own name spoken like that — with a kind of careful weight to it, like the person saying it wasn't entirely sure what state they'd find me in.I looked up.She was standing in the doorway, dressed in a pink short-sleeved house coat, one hand resting lightly against the frame. Her dark brown eyes were fixed on me with an intensity that caught me completely off guard — steady and searching, as if she were trying to locate something specific in my expression. Her hair fell loose around her shoulders. There was a stillness about her that didn't match the concern on her face.

  I looked away almost immediately.It had felt wrong, in a way I couldn't expin cleanly. Not because of her — because of me. Because whatever soul was sitting inside this body, it was aware enough to know it didn't entirely belong here. Looking at her directly had felt like crossing a boundary I hadn't agreed to.I took a breath and looked back up.She hadn't moved. Her brows were drawn slightly together now, her eyes still carrying that same visible worry — the kind that doesn't perform itself, that just sits there quietly and refuses to leave. It was as if she had already decided that whatever was wrong with me, she wanted to fix it, and was simply waiting for permission to try.

  She seemed like family. A sister, judging by her age and the way she existed in this house like she had always been here. But there had always been something slightly off about the way she was around me — something unspoken that I had never been able to name. She rarely looked at me directly. She kept her distance in ways that were never expined. She watched from the edge of rooms instead of entering them.I had never understood it.

  She hadn't moved. Her brows were drawn slightly together, her eyes still carrying that same quiet worry — the kind that doesn't announce itself, that just sits there and refuses to leave.I looked at her for a long moment.Then I made a decision."I can't remember anything."The words came out smaller than I intended. Barely above a whisper. Like saying them too loudly would make them more real than I was ready for.

  She stared at me. "What?""I can't remember who I am." My throat tightened around the words as they came. "Where I am. Who you are. I can't remember any of it. Not a single thing that should matter."The silence that followed felt enormous.

  I hadn't pnned to say it like that. I hadn't pnned for my voice to crack somewhere in the middle of it either. But sitting there, in that room, with her eyes on me and the weight of however many days of bnkness pressing down on my chest — something gave."I keep reaching back," I continued, not entirely sure why I was still talking, "and there's nothing there. No faces. No names. Not even a feeling of what I was supposed to be. Just..." I exhaled slowly. "Nothing."My hands were resting on my knees. I noticed, distantly, that they were trembling.

  "I wake up every morning and I don't know who I'm supposed to be when I open my eyes. I look in the mirror and the face looking back doesn't feel like mine." I pressed my lips together, trying to hold the rest of it in. It didn't work. "I don't know what I'm supposed to do with that. I don't know how you're supposed to keep going when you can't even remember what you were going toward."The tears arrived without warning. Not dramatically — just quietly, the way exhaustion eventually becomes visible whether you want it to or not. I didn't wipe them away. I was too tired to bother.

  "I just feel lost," I said, and my voice finally broke on the st word. "That's all I can tell you. I feel completely, entirely lost."She didn't speak.I finally looked up at her properly, for the first time since she'd walked in. Her expression had changed. The careful distance she usually kept — that invisible boundary she maintained without ever expining it — was gone. In its pce was something raw and unguarded, something she clearly hadn't meant to show.

  Her brown eyes were glistening."You really don't remember anything?" she asked, her voice quieter now. Almost fragile."No.""Any... thing?"I shook my head.

  She stood there for another moment, just looking at me, and I could see her trying to process it — the way her jaw tightened slightly, the way her fingers pressed into the door frame just enough to whiten at the knuckles.Then, without a word, she turned and walked away. Her footsteps were quick on the stairs. Too quick — like she needed to put distance between herself and whatever she was feeling before it caught up with her.I sat alone in the quiet she left behind.

  The tears dried on their own. I didn't have the energy to think about whether I'd made the right choice. I didn't have the energy for much of anything.

  I just sat there, in a body that didn't feel like mine, in a life I couldn't remember choosing, and waited for something — anything — to tell me what came next.Nothing did.But just before she had turned away — just before she disappeared through the doorway — I caught it.

  A smile

  Faint. Barely there. The kind that appears for half a second before the person wearing it realizes and pulls it back.I didn't know what to make of it.I still don't.

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  AnnouncementIs the length good or I should make I make it longer?