Symbiosis

Célian The market breathes me in, a giant lung, each exhalation carrying its own cargo of misery. I stumble between the stalls, shoulders hunched under the weight of pains that aren't mine. The fishmonger's migraine – a pillar of fire behind the right eye – radiates into my own temples, pulsing to the rhythm of his raucous announcements. Further on, the old woman's rheumatism, bent over her crates of potatoes, seeps into my joints, a cold, viscous venom freezing my movements. It's not just physical sensations. It's the anxiety of the mother counting her coins, the despair of the unemployed man wandering aimlessly, the repressed anger of the jostled teenager. A discordant symphony of suffering resonating in the cage of my ribs, a cursed choir for which I am the sole audience. I stop, hands gripping a greengrocer's stall. The bright colors of peppers and eggplants dance, blur, merging with the painful flashes that streak my vision. The world is a sensory cacophony. The acrid smell of rotten fish mingles with the heady perfume of ripe melons, and each whiff carries its own emotional burden. I close my eyes, fingers digging into the rough wood of the stall, desperately seeking a fixed point in this chaos, a second of respite. In vain. The tide rises, inexorable, ready to swallow me whole. And then I see her. Sitting on a bench, apart from the flow of passersby. A young woman. Her hair, a blonde so pale it's almost white, falls in inert cascades over her shoulders. She is perfectly still, hands placed flat on her knees, like a wax doll abandoned there. People pass, jostle, live, laugh, get annoyed around her, forming a whirlwind of loud, colorful life. But her… she is a hole in reality. A patch of silence in the middle of the noise. A void. What strikes me, what takes my breath away so much I have to lean on the stall to keep from falling, is this: around her, nothing. No pain. No parasitic emotion. None of those nauseating waves that constantly wash over me. It's the first, the only zone of absolute silence I have ever encountered. An oasis in the desert of my torments. Hypnotized, I detach myself from the stall. Each step I take toward her is a liberation. The fishmonger's migraine recedes, like someone turning down the volume on a blaring radio. The old woman's rheumatism retreats, leaving behind a forgotten feeling of lightness. The mental cacophony, that constant murmur inhabiting my skull, drops a notch, then another. Silence. A silence so deep, so precious, it's almost painful. My ears ring with this absence of sound. I sit next to her, on the cold bench. The wood barely creaks. She doesn't turn her head. Her gaze, a grey so pale it's almost translucent, fixes on an invisible point in the distance, beyond the stalls, beyond the buildings. Her pupils barely blink. She breathes with disconcerting slowness, her chest barely rising. She seems to be waiting. As if she has always been waiting. "Excuse me," I murmur, my voice hoarse, strangled by emotion and sudden relief. Several endless seconds pass. Then, with a slowness that seems to defy time itself, she turns her head towards me. Her face is a perfect oval, milky pale. No expression. No wrinkle of curiosity or concern. No shadow of fear. It's a marble mask, smooth and impenetrable. Her eyes, those stagnant grey lakes, settle on me without seeing me, or perhaps seeing beyond. "Yes?" Her voice is flat, monotone, without the slightest inflection. It resonates strangely, almost synthetic, devoid of the human warmth that usually colors speech. The silence she generates is so intoxicating that I struggle to form my thoughts. I could stay here for hours, simply breathing this purified air. "You... you don't feel anything?" I finally stammer, unable to believe in such an absence, such neutrality in the noisy world around us. Her gaze doesn't leave mine. She stares at me for a long time, as if analyzing the question from all angles, like a computer processing a complex query. There is neither offense nor surprise in her attitude. Just a neutral assessment. "No," she finally says. "Nothing." The word falls into the air between us, simple and definitive. Nothing. And in the emptiness of her gaze, in the immense silence emanating from her, I see far more than a simple peculiarity. I see my salvation. The possibility of breathing without burning. The promise of a truce. My heart beats faster, not from anguish, but from a mad, terrible, and magnificent hope.