✧ Chapter: The Weight of a Moment

He didn’t remember much of what he saw after that.

Not the streets of Córdoba, not the tapas cafés or the antique stalls near the Roman bridge.
His feet moved, but something in him had stopped.

He kept thinking: I should’ve said something.
But no words came.
And beneath that thought, deeper and quieter, another:
It wasn’t time.

He sat later in a small plaza with a cup of bitter coffee gone cold.
A child laughed nearby. A bell chimed.
And the world continued, unknowing.

But inside him, a stillness stretched.

Not empty —
but expectant.

He didn’t know her name.
Didn’t know if he would ever see her again.
Didn’t know why that moment felt like the beginning of something older than his own life.

But he knew this:
he had been moved.
Shifted.
And some invisible part of him was now oriented toward her —
like a compass realigned.

He looked up at the sky.
A pale, cloudless blue.
And wondered how a single silent moment could weigh more than an entire year.


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