[c=#2dba69]The Fragments of Erdos - Part 1
Nowhere and Everywhere[/c]

[c=#a8c8e8][i]I never left a name. Some saw me walk by, others passed me without recognizing me.
I always preferred the places where no one expected me.[/i][/c]

This world overflows with certainties, but few of them deserve a second look.
The living cut things short, declare, close one debate only to open another at once, as though truth were won by the speed at which one proclaims it. I eventually grew wary of that speed. A thought that closes too quickly has often only found a convenient wall to stop at - not an answer.

I began, long ago, searching for what others had left unfinished. Not the great works that get celebrated, their authors' names carved in letters meant to last forever, but the ones abandoned along the way - work begun with fervor, then set aside for lack of time, of strength, or simply of life. Copyists' workshops deserted for generations. Study halls with fallen shutters, where rain now enters as freely as students once did. Scholars' towers people eventually came to believe haunted, only because no one climbed them anymore to finish what their occupant never had time to complete.

I walked for years along roads I never chose twice, passing through villages whose names I've forgotten, sleeping under abandoned porches or right on the ground when no roof would have me. I stopped each time a place seemed to carry more than its own dust - an inflection in the silence, a density I couldn't better describe than by saying it resembled a sentence interrupted mid-thought, still waiting for someone to finish it in the speaker's place.

Some of these places are covered in writing, others bare, worn smooth by generations of damp until nothing remains but a flat, gray wall. And yet, all of them resonate, if one takes the time to stop long enough to stop being in a hurry - which, I eventually came to understand, takes far longer than one imagines at first. In my early years I still grew impatient. I would leave after a few minutes, believing a silent place would stay silent. I have learned, since, that no place is ever truly silent. Only ears that haven't yet learned to be quiet long enough to hear.

I was given a name, over time - Erdos - even though I never claimed one for myself while I lived. I believe people eventually needed to put one on what I left behind, if only to be able to name it without losing track, in the villages where my passing was whispered about after the fact. I never corrected anyone on that. A name, after all, is just one more label stuck onto what remains, and I had no reason to refuse that one over any other.

I found, long ago, an abandoned instrument near a long-deserted workshop, on a path I had only taken by chance, or by something resembling it - a detour taken to avoid a downpour, I believe, or perhaps the reverse; memory fades faster than one would wish, even for those who trade in it. A bone flute, plain, unadorned, nearly gray from having been carried by hands I will never know anything about. I never knew who had left it there, nor how long it had been waiting beneath the dust that had begun to cover it. I came to understand, over the years, that it wasn't meant to play music: it was meant to give voice to what a place had held for far too long, what no one had bothered to gather before forgetting erased it entirely.

I shaped parchments from what I gathered this way - not my own thoughts, no, I keep very few of those for myself, barely enough to hold a conversation should anyone ever ask, which almost never happens. What I gather are fragments of reasoning that still floated in the air of these abandoned places, clinging to interrupted work, to intuitions no one had time to carry through before everything stopped. Ideas someone would have wanted to pass on to another and which never found an heir, in villages I passed through without even knowing their name, under skies I could no longer place on any map. I have gathered so many, over the years, that I could no longer name them all if asked.

These parchments are neither magical nor safe. They do not wait to be read the way one reads a letter, with the eyes only, from a distance, never getting one's hands dirty. They wait to be absorbed - to be let inside oneself, with everything they carry, without always knowing in advance what it will cost to carry them in turn.

You hold this first fragment. Perhaps you found it by chance - or perhaps not, I no longer quite believe in chance since I began doing what I do, since I've seen too many paths cross again to call it mere coincidence. If you wish to follow this thread, know one thing before going further: every parchment you consume will lead you to another, but nothing will come to one who does not move forward, who is content to keep this first fragment the way one keeps a curious object on a shelf, showing it off without ever truly opening it.

Memory is not a gift. It is an exchange. And like every exchange, it asks that you put something of yourself into it.
