It's not real

After the death of his mother, a time of emptiness begins for Daniel. The funeral is behind him, the apartment is quiet, life goes on. At least outwardly. Daniel functions. He does not mourn openly, speaks little, represses a lot. He believes that he has already survived the worst. But the night contradicts him. At first, it's just a whisper. Quietly. Unobtrusively. A voice under his window that sounds too familiar to be a coincidence. And too fake to seem real. It carries the sound of his mother, but without her warmth. Without memory. As if something had learned how she spoke without understanding what she was. Daniel knows that his mother is dead. Burned. Redeemed. And yet he hears her night after night.
What could be dismissed as an acoustic hallucination slowly begins to eat into his life. The voice knows things that no one should know. Little things. Guilt. Thoughts that have never been spoken. It does not impose itself, does not ask for anything. It waits. Patiently. Scrutinizing. And with every listen, Daniel loses a piece of his inner boundary. Sleep becomes impossible, closeness unbearable, trust a risk. While Daniel becomes more and more rigid on the outside, something begins to shift inside. His relationship does not break down because of conflicts, but because of fear. Fear that someone will notice how motionless he lies there at night. How he counts breaths. How he can no longer distinguish which sounds belong to the house. And which have learned what a house sounds like.