A child clings to the carpet with their fingers. Rubbing the pile between their knuckles, like they’re searching for something important. They lean on their hands, flop their chin on the floor, lips puckered — almost funny. An adult voice laughs somewhere off to the side. But it’s far away, not for them right now. The whole universe is squeezed into these two legs taking a step. No past, no future — just balance, steadiness, trying not to fall.

You watch and suddenly catch yourself: you learned to walk just like that. You were that child. You faced the same stubborn floor that won’t give way under your heel. Only here’s the weird part — not a single second of that experience stuck. You don’t remember your own falls. Or the day you finally managed to take more than three steps in a row.

It’s like you weren’t there at all.

The pause stretches long, the thought spins around a simple question — where did all these things come from that now feel so natural? Walking. Voice. Recognizing faces on the morning subway — a flash of a silhouette, and you just know: friend or stranger.

You use all this every day so confidently, like you always knew how.

But no one remembers a single lesson for this basic set of skills.

When did language become yours? When did thousands of words gather into sentences? Who taught you to hear sadness in the wrinkles near your mother’s eyes? All learned without any memory of the process.

Sometimes it feels like someone else slowly and stubbornly learned instead of you and then handed you a ready-made body with a control system.

You test yourself: it’s impossible to remember the first time you said “mama” or stood up without holding on to a chair. Empty.

Even if you strain with all your might — there’s nothing beyond the first photos from childhood.

The foundation was laid deep before you ever thought of yourself as someone separate. That little kid in pajamas with velcro — are they part of your story or a completely different person?

It’s easy to move through the rooms of your apartment with a cup of tea; your feet know the path between the armchair and the door even in your sleep. Your tongue shoots out the right words before your mind catches up: you don’t have time to realize the question, and the answer is already out there in your own voice.

But the memory of building all this is wiped clean.

Every day you live on an apartment floor and walk on the floor… but you’ve never seen the supporting beams below, don’t know the wiring plan under the linoleum.

Can you trust what you’ve never seen with your own eyes?

If today you tried to learn a new language or pick up the same skill (like rollerblading), it would take long months of conscious effort — memorizing rules, repeating until your muscles hurt, making mistakes and getting annoyed.

But here’s a whole world built inside you in a couple of years without instructions or teachers.

Does everything real come to you?

Your memory switched on too late and now only serves the building already made?

If the foundation of my personality was laid by someone else inside me — did I do anything myself? Or do I just step onto the stage of my own play and find traces of someone else’s steps on the crumbling path of light ahead?