Anthesis of Sadness

I fell.

But there was no ground. Nothing. Not even that instinctive promise of an impact to come, not that painful anticipation of the moment when the fall meets its end. Nothing. No wall, no ceiling, no reference point. No echo to bounce back my presence. No limit to confirm that I still existed. Only this void. This silence. This absence suspended like a too-heavy sheet over a memory laid too bare.

And yet... I was falling. Falling without speed, without motion, without sound. A fall that no longer fell. A drift frozen in the absolute of a boundless nothingness. As if the world had stopped spinning around me, but continued to suck me in, piece by piece, fiber by fiber, until nothing identifiable was left. There was no light. No shadow. Only this strange texture, this soft density that touched nothing but still weighed. A matrix without weight, without shape, without name. A place that refused to be a place. A reality that refused to be conceived.

And then... it was my body that spoke first. Not with a word. With a cry muffled in the marrow. A voiceless moan threading between my bones, like a nerve memory unwilling to be erased. I felt my joints tense — not to resist, but to beg. Every second tugged at my tendons like glass hooks, stretching them, rending them, slowly unraveling them like a ball of flesh decomposing in silence. I didn’t feel pain. Not yet. But the discomfort rose, creeping, internal, sharpened.

The slowness... became torture.

Not a clear, identifiable, graspable suffering — but that blurry torment that insinuates itself into duration, that infiltrates time like a blade into memory. That sensation of having not what you are ripped from you... but what you believe yourself to be.

Then, another pain seeped in.

Duller. Sharper. More real than the void itself. It needed no shape. It needed no cry. It slipped inside me like an ancient truth, denied too long, pushed away by instinct but always lurking somewhere, just there, between two heartbeats. And it pulsed. It pulsed in a precise spot — a living, burning knot, too sharp to be merely a muscle, too alive to be just an organ. It came from the heart. Yes. But not the one you examine. Not the one you heal. The one you betray. The one you abandon. The one you forget too late.

So I gripped it.

Hard.

Harder.