Chapter 9: The Drift

It crept in quietly.

Not through scandal. Not through excess, but through ease.

I stopped checking prices, stopped remembering which city I was in without checking the monogram on the hotel robe. I learned how to say less, to let gravity enter the room before I did, how to carry a silence longer than most men can bear.

At first, I thought I was adapting.

But really, I was dissolving.

There was a week, maybe in Marrakesh, where I don’t remember speaking. Just nodding. Smiling. Existing as the shape people wanted to see.

People introduced me now with reverence, like a whisper meant only for those who knew. I watched my name become an accessory to other names — heavier names. Until mine meant something too.

I started missing calls from people I once cared about. But I did not silence them. I let them ring out loud, like proof that I had moved on.

At a gathering in Vienna — a villa carved into the hills, every surface soft with wealth — a man leaned in to admire the RM and said:

“You remind me of the man who wore that before you.”

He did not elaborate.

Just walked away, as if he had handed me a mirror I was not ready to hold.

For days after, I kept seeing my reflection in strange places windowpanes, polished marble, the lenses of other people’s sunglasses.

And sometimes, I did not recognise who was looking back.