By that November evening, Amil had been feeling drained for over a week.
Dinner was small and deliberate: toast, a boiled egg, a salad of tomato and cucumber.
Something to prove he could still tend to himself.
He had just sat down when the knock came.
Not the polite ring his neighbors used, but a knock—flat, insistent.
That is how he remembers it, without any witness.
When he opened the door, the man standing there did not introduce himself.
He began asking questions instead.
Full name.
Date.
Time.
Place of birth.
Amil answered.
The man stepped inside as though expected.
Not invited—just not refused.
“It’s time,” he said, as if the words had arrived before him.
Amil heard himself ask, “Should I be worried?”
The man did not answer immediately.
He looked around the room, as though recognizing something Amil had not yet named.
“People ask questions… life doesn’t seem to answer,” he said, as if arriving at the sentence while speaking.
Amil frowned. “Then what are we supposed to do with them?”
The man didn’t answer right away.
He seemed to be listening for something that wasn’t in the room.
“Carry them,” he said. “Or build something while you carry them.”
He paused.
“Life doesn’t wait for answers.
But it does, eventually, ask for an account.”
“An account of what?”
“Of the kind of person you were,” the man said,
“and what you made with what was given to you.”
Hours later, neighbors found him unconscious, the front door open.
After that evening, the memory stayed with him—not as something he could prove, but as something that returned with a strange authority.
He wasn’t afraid of dying, not exactly.
He had seen too many goodbyes to expect drama.
No fanfare. Just a long exhale, and then the room goes on as if it had already begun to forget you.
What unsettled him was simpler.
He feared being forgotten in the middle of the forgetting.