Black streaks that breathe

VHO - “There are cracks that are never wounds. They are doors, memories, tiny breaths of something that lived - and never had a name.”

I placed my hand on the stone wall of the ancient tower. The stone was cold, but it was not the cold of matter, but the cold of time - of centuries that had passed, silently condensing in every brick, every crack, every eroded vein. My fingers seemed to touch a layer of memory that had materialized, crystallized into silence.

In the crack as thin as a knife cut into the flesh of the earth and rock, there was a black streak. It was not still. I could feel it moving, like an invisible flow, hidden under the layers of time.

The black streak crawled along the edge of the bricks, along the stone grooves, and then disappeared into the moss clumps that silently clung to the wall. Under the light slanting through the old tree canopy, the black streak suddenly sparkled, not brightly but painfully - like the last glance of a person about to leave.

I think of a fallen dynasty - Champa, its red-stained citadels, its gods and love stories left in the dust.

Perhaps, here once lived a Cham girl walking barefoot on the cold stone steps, holding a lithophone in her arms, looking out into the forest, waiting for someone who would never return.

When the warhorse pulled back to the foot of the tower, when the fire burned down the entire dynasty, that love still remained, as small as a speck of dust, but as enduring as that black spot - never disappearing.

I stood there, in the silent ruins, seeing that black streak as a living being - a stream of memory flowing across history, continuing to write things that have never been named.

The black streaks meandered around the brick holes, then blended into the tree roots, and crept down into the rocks, like an underground stream that never dried up. No one had actually seen them, but everyone had felt their presence, like a whisper in their hearts, very soft, but impossible to ignore.

The sky above the dome of the tower seemed heavy. A divine bird suddenly fluttered from the tower, not the sound of wings flying, but the thin sound of contact between the sky and memory. That sound made the space sway, leaving an echo like an invisible thread connecting the past and the present, between the soul and the body.

In the corner of the wall, the fingers of an ancient relief reached up, moving in the evening light - as if trying to grasp something that was melting. I heard the wind whistling through the empty vaults, like Shiva waking up.

You - I don't know where you came from - stood beside me, your gaze distant as if you had lived through many lifetimes. I touched your hand, only touching the thin layer of smoke, fragrant with incense. You are the embodiment of those who once loved in silence, waited in the mist, and melted into stone.

I felt as if from deep within the tower there was an old, cracked heart, oozing black streaks - not of sadness, but the imprint of untold stories, of unmet desires.

The love in me at that time had no name, no promise, but it had a form: the form of a black streak silently clinging to the ancient stone wall. I did not know who started that love, where it ended, but it existed - without witnesses, without ceremony.

It is a music that does not resonate out loud, but only vibrates in the chest whenever we touch something that was once sacred.

The stone wall was no longer an object. It was a piece of music that had not yet been performed. Each crack, each black streak was a deep note. As the light faded through the moss, I saw: not just the scars of time, but the lingering soul. And on the shimmering moss, I suddenly saw blooming blue flowers.

I pressed my hand to the stone again, not to learn, but to be still with it. And in that silence, I heard a breath, not from the temple, but from within myself.

A deep part of me that I had lost - now, is returning, with you, with the black streaks shimmering on the ancient background.

We, and that love, have merged into the vastness.

Source: https://baovanhoa.vn/van-hoa/nhung-vet-den-biet-tho-151502.html