The sun hits my face now, warm and heavy, a physical weight pressing down on my eyelids. It feels so solid I want to rub it in, to test if the light has substance or if it’s just another projection of my brain trying to fill the void again. But when I close my hand over the warmth, it stays there. Steady. Unwavering.

I walk past a street vendor selling roasted chestnuts. The smell hits me first—sharp, nutty, caramelized sugar cutting through the damp air of the morning. A man in a beanie hands me a paper cone wrapped in foil. His fingers are rough, stained with soot and coffee grease. He smiles, a crinkling of eyes and crow’s feet that looks entirely human and unremarkable until I realize he’s been staring at me for ten seconds straight.

“Enjoy,” he says, his voice raspy but clear. “Keep the warmth.”

I nod, taking the cone. The foil is hot against my palm. Inside, two chestnuts steam up immediately, filling my nose with that rich scent again. I take a bite. It tastes like woodsmoke and honey. Perfectly ordinary. Or maybe it’s perfect in its own way—the kind of ordinary that feels like a miracle because I’ve forgotten what peace looks like.

A siren wails in the distance, cutting through the street noise with an urgency that makes everyone else pause just long enough to acknowledge it before moving on as if nothing happened. The sound isn’t distorted or stuttering this time. It’s clean. Crisp. Final. And yet, when it fades into the background hum of the city, there’s a lingering echo in my ear that doesn’t match the rhythm I heard earlier—the one that felt like a heartbeat from outside my skin.

I keep walking, chestnut cone forgotten in my other hand, feeling lighter than I have since I stepped through those doors last night. The world hasn’t fixed itself. Nothing has truly changed except me. My perception of it, at least. Or maybe the change was always happening underneath everything else, beneath the shadows and the tapping and the spinning handles, and I only just noticed that I could see through them now.

A pigeon lands on a lamppost nearby, cocking its head as if listening to something I can’t hear. It looks at me with those dark, bead-like eyes, unblinking for a second too long before fluttering away into the crowd of pedestrians. Just a bird doing what birds do. A reminder that life continues regardless of whether anyone is paying attention or trying to solve puzzles inside their heads while standing still on a sidewalk.

I take another bite of the chestnut. It’s sweet and hot, filling me up in a way that feels real. Real enough that I don’t need to question why I believe it anymore. Real enough that for a moment, I almost forget everything else—the box, the key, the dot on the page—and just exist here, in this stream of sunlight and noise and heat and taste.

And maybe that’s all there ever was to begin with. Maybe the mystery wasn’t about finding something hidden or unlocking something sealed away. Maybe it was just about learning how to let go of the need for answers when everything is already right here, happening exactly as it should, one second at a time.