Something unnamed recedes within the process of becoming human. Not meaning, not emotion, not even that familiar ache of longing — what disappears is the capacity to endure presence itself.

‏This is becoming human: not death, because death, at the very least, offers an ending. Rather, it is the prolonged condition of inhabiting a body emptied from within. The eyes remain open. The body keeps moving. Language continues to speak. And yet, nothing reveals itself any longer. Light still exists, but it no longer sees.

‏This silence begins inside a closed room, where one’s relation to oneself becomes so diminished that the question of the self neither receives the wrong answer nor remains unanswered; rather, the possibility of asking dissolves altogether.

‏From there, it leaks outward into shared space, becoming a condition in which everyone turns into someone else, and no one remains fully their own. A line of bodies standing beside one another, while none truly stay.

‏Eventually, it settles within vision itself — where looking no longer touches, but merely slides across surfaces. Images appear and disappear without ever embedding themselves in the body.