# The Call I don't know what calls me anymore— the old hungers have turned to dust, their voices threadbare as last year's cloth. Sometimes it's the hour before dawn when the world holds its breath, when even the birds won't sing, when silence has weight and substance. Sometimes it's a stranger's face glimpsed in a crowded street, and for one moment I am certain I've always known them, that they carry in their eyes a message I've spent lifetimes forgetting. The call comes without warning, without courtesy or reason. It doesn't ask permission; it simply arrives like grief, like the smell of rain on parched earth, like the ache of a song you cannot name. I have tried to answer it. I have walked down roads that narrowed into nothing, climbed towers that dissolved into air, knocked on doors that opened onto other doors. Each time I think I've found it— the source, the meaning, the destination— it slips away like water through open hands, leaving only the certainty that I am called, and the terrible, necessary doubt that I will never arrive. Yet still I listen. Still I turn toward the sound. For what else can a soul do when it hears its own true name spoken in a language it doesn't understand?