That man stopped before the root that emerged from the ground like a thought no one had asked for. The park thickened into a sharp silence, but the afternoon kept moving behind the branches, ignorant of its own existence. He observed the root, uniform and alien to all reason, though solidly real. Then he felt it, not vertigo but a slow jolt that brushed his stomach and reminded him that the world was not made to fit his ideas.

A child's footsteps awakened something in him. A blurred image of himself running through this same park decades ago, but the memory came and went like a gust, passing through him without staying. No man can carry the past. Only our body belongs to us, a body that cannot harbor all the memories it holds. Memories arrive and traverse us when something activates them, but they remain in the past, that past no one can carry in their pocket.

The distant song of a bird, the roughness of the rusted bench, everything seemed to conspire to show him that things simply are. They had no need for his gaze, nor his name, nor the story he might want to tell them. In that strange clarity he discovered that the root, the bench, even his own hand, shared an elusive secret. They existed just because, without pretext or destiny.

He remained motionless for a few seconds, perhaps an intimate eternity, until the first streetlight turned on with a faint hum. The orange glow struck the bark and made it shine with luminous indifference. What traversed him was the echo of a universe that stands upright without justification, reminding him with silent tenderness that his presence was merely another trembling fiber in the vastness of the unnecessary, and that the memories he believed to be his were nothing more than ghosts that visited his body without asking permission to stay.