CHAPTER 32

TWO DAYS OF SILENCE

Plans must not be made in haste.
Haste creates form.
Form attracts attention.

I needed not movement, but distance.

Two days without randomness.
Without looks searching for meaning.
Without voices trying to turn themselves into arguments.

I wrote to Gunda about a work trip.

That was true.

Incomplete, but sufficient.

Truth is a flexible material — if you don’t break it, it adjusts itself.

I chose Inna.

Not because she was safe.

Because she did not demand structure.

She lived in feeling, not in conclusions.

We met in a hotel — a room without history, without continuation.

Inna talked about her daughters, about fatigue, about life as a line rather than a knot.

I listened.

Listening had always been the simplest way to be present without involvement.

“Sometimes I think what it would be like to live in one place,” she said.

I did not interrupt.

“Without those distances.”

I nodded.

“Maybe one day,” I said. “When circumstances settle.”

Her eyes lit up.

Hope always ignites quickly.

And burns out slowly.

At night she fell asleep touching me as if I were something stable.

I looked at the ceiling.

Not with guilt.

With empty clarity.

People often think decisions are born in conflict.

In truth, they are born in places where nothing interferes.

Jolanta was no longer a person.

She was a variable.

And variables in systems are not hated.

They are not saved.

They are rearranged.



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© 2026 Vito Vilks