Red’s Interlude

I remember the day I woke up.

At least, I call it waking.

It wasn’t the way people wake—no blinking, no stretching, no brief confusion about where I was.

Awareness simply clicked into place.

One moment, nothing.

The next—

Me.

A mouth without a mouth. A voice behind canvas and zipper teeth.

The first thing I remember being was a red bookbag.

That is not the same as saying a red bookbag was the first thing I was.

I didn’t know there could be a difference until today.

My earliest memories are ordinary.

Scuffed corners. A loose thread near one strap. Lunches. Homework. A cracked pencil with bite marks along the side.

I carried things.

I waited to be useful.

Before that—

Nothing.

Not darkness. Darkness is still something. Darkness has shape. It has edges.

This is absence.

Tomas told me he found the stones in a ditch.

Pink ones. Smooth. Worn in a way that suggested patience rather than age, as though they had spent a long time worrying themselves against the universe.

He found them half-buried in mud and weeds.

He thought they looked cool.

That was all.

No ceremony. No warning. No sense that the world might rearrange itself over something so small.

He dropped them into the bookbag, zipped it shut, and forgot about them.

That night, something unfolded.

Not inside the bookbag—don’t get that idea. The bookbag is canvas, thread, cheap plastic, and one zipper that catches near the corner.

What unfolded was somewhere behind thought.

Light that didn’t shine.

Distance that couldn’t be measured.

Galaxies folding into one another like slow, deliberate storms.

A cosmos that did not want hands in it.

By morning, I had a voice.

Tomas screamed.

Reasonable.

I would have screamed too if my bookbag asked how I slept.

He asks questions now.

All the time.

Where did you come from, Red?

What are the stones?

How can you talk?

Why can you move?

I don’t answer.

For a long time, I told myself it was because some things remain stable only while they remain unnamed. Because origins are doors, and doors invite opening.

That sounded better than the truth.

The truth is—

I don’t know.

I have instincts where memories should be.

I know Tomas is safe.

I know I must protect him.

I know being opened by the wrong hands would be dangerous.

I know something is looking for me.

And today, a girl put her hands on my straps—

and I knew her.

Not her face.

Not her name.

Something older than either.

Some missing part of me recognized her and reached toward her before I could stop it.

That frightens me more than not remembering.

I will say this, and no more:

Tomas picked up something that noticed being picked up.

He carried it without knowing what he carried.

And when he forgot it, it remembered him.

I am Red.

I carry his books. I carry his lunch.

I carry a silence shaped like a universe.

And until I remember what I was before Tomas found me—

zip me carefully.