I looked after her. She started walking up the merciless hill that seemed sworn to torment me. I stood there briefly looking at her — before I started walking away. Time itself seemed to bend at the edges, distorting into a cruel dimension that refused to move forward or backward — just trapped in this one agonizing instant. I was suspended in a liminal, surreal space, teetering on the edge of everything I knew — everything I learned not too long ago. I could feel the hopelessness pouring out of my fingertips, so eager to reach what had just fled. It was as if my hands still remembered the warmth they had lost, trembling with a phantom memory they could not release. The sensations were blending into each other, overwhelmingly. The veins in my fragile heart stretched helplessly, as if trying to contain the pain I knew was coming. Even the light seemed unsure of itself, flickering between mercy and indifference. The horizon blurred. I remembered. Not too long ago, the world was whole and untouched by this rupture. I was trying to make sense of it. I stood rooted in place, watching her silhouette brutally merge with the shadows, and with it, the life I once knew. The hill swallowed her slowly, like a quiet, deliberate erasure. My soul was bruising. I remained there, half-alive in the aftershock, learning what it meant to exist in the space where something sacred had just been undone. The moment stretched out endlessly, an eternity of goodbyes crammed into a single breath, until finally, there was nothing left to say, nothing left to hold onto — only the distant hum of a world that continued spinning, in an alternate reality, where the colors were still bright and breathing was still worth it.