The Question He Drowned

“Why him?” is the one question that would explain everything to Jacob. Which is exactly why it cannot be asked: the psyche guards an answer that is incompatible with his sense of self. Repression is not lying and not pretending — it is an automatic mechanism that works before consciousness gets a say.

But repression has a price: the question that was never allowed to surface does not disappear — it governs from the dark. Jacob genuinely does not know why he turns into someone else’s hallway. Whatever a person refuses to know about himself, he is condemned to live out blindly — usually at someone else’s expense.