Then I returned. Slowly. Without having decided to. As if drawn. As if pulled in by a memory I hadn't chosen, a memory that, despite everything I had tried to abandon, refused to die. It wasn't a return guided by will, nor even by nostalgia. It was a call. A silent call, rooted in another plane. Something in me — or around — was bringing me back to that specific place, that islet among the others, but different, denser, wider, heavier in the air as in the soul.
I returned to an islet that seemed to possess its own gravity. It didn't wait — it weighed. It slowed my steps before I even set foot on it, as if space itself were contracting around me there, as if the air became thicker, more saturated, loaded with old and unspoken things. Its shape, seen from above or afar, wasn't a perfect circle. It was an irregular contour, a fractured loop, imperfect, like a poorly closed scar on a world that had never healed.
