Selah Noctila

Selah slowly pushed the cart through the aisles of the shop, each step echoing with a fatigue that went beyond simple physical weariness. Since the divorce, even the most mundane tasks had become a monumental effort, a series of mechanical actions that barely managed to keep him connected to the outside world. The supermarket, with its cold white lighting, seemed an empty stage, a place where everything he had lost was reflected in the fleeting glances of the other shoppers.

He stopped the cart in front of the cereal shelves, staring unseeing at the colorful boxes that lined up like soldiers in a row. His eyes, once full of curiosity and life, were now gloomy shafts that rarely focused on anything concrete. He picked up a box at random, not really caring which one it was, and dropped it into the cart, the empty bottom of which echoed with the echo of his loneliness.

As he moved toward the dairy section, he felt a familiar presence that made him stop in his tracks. A few meters ahead, next to the coolers, stood someone he hadn't seen in years, and who he never expected to find himself in this nondescript corner of his life. One of his ex-partners from college was there, checking the yogurts with a concentration that seemed almost exaggerated.

Selah's heart skipped a beat, thumping against his ribs with a force that surprised him. It wasn't just the shock of meeting that person again after so long, but what that vision carried with it: memories of a lost youth, of moments of shared laughter and nights of chatting until dawn, when the world seemed full of possibilities and sadness was but a distant shadow.

He felt a desperate urge to turn on his heels and disappear into the corridors, to avoid the encounter at all costs. He didn't feel able to face someone who knew him before everything fell apart, before life molded him into this lonely, broken being. But his feet didn't respond, as if a part of him, the part that still longed for a bond with his former self, resisted running away.

That person looked up and their eyes met. For a second, his ex's expression was indecipherable, a mosaic of surprise, recognition and something that might have been sadness, or perhaps pity. Selah felt the air thicken around her, every fiber of her being crying out to disappear, to not have to face the gaze of someone who would recognize the scars that time had left behind.

Selah tried to smile, but the grimace that emerged on his face was more of a shadow of its former self. He greeted with a slight nod, fighting the lump forming in his throat that prevented him from uttering a word. "Uh, hello…," he managed to articulate in a barely audible voice, robotic, the way he felt his mind drifting away from reality without permission.