Anthesis of Sadness

I resumed the road, heavy-footed, blank-eyed, breath mechanical, with no true direction, no light to follow, no promise to reach. There was nothing ahead of me. Nothing behind. Just that fractured expanse, that non-world suspended between memory and abandonment. I wasn’t walking to move forward. I was walking to keep going. To not extinguish myself. To not become even more silence than I already was.

And step by step, hour by hour perhaps — or eternities, I no longer really knew — something began to stir within me. Slowly. Almost insidiously. Not a jolt. Not a scream. An older presence. Denser. Like an egg cracking beneath the skin. Like a buried pulse gaining ground.

It wasn’t energy. It wasn’t a calling. It was rage. A bare anger, simple, without brilliance, that didn’t seek to explode but simply to exist. A rage for myself, aimed at what I had become, at what I had allowed, at all those times I had begged, picked myself up, accepted. It wasn’t fire. It was cold. Acid. A slow bite, laid beneath my skin like a sleeping beast, waiting, tucking its claws under my flesh until its hour came.

It didn’t rumble.

It didn’t scream.

It breathed.

And I felt, with every step, that it was taking root a little more.

I knew. With a silent, rooted knowledge, that came neither from thought nor heart, but from that deeper territory — the one we never dare question because it carries all the answers we flee. I knew that what I was living through was nothing. Nothing more than a threshold. An entry point. A brutal initiation, yet still incomplete.

This world — or what was left of it — hadn’t yet begun to break me. It would open me. Tear me apart without apparent violence. Not by claws. Not by iron. But by truth. It would force me to look. To set my eyes, without turning them away, on all I had tried to bury under layers of rage, amnesia, and escape. It would rip me away from my own detours, pin me down before what I had always run from, relentlessly, unforgivingly.

Every nightmare would return. Not in the form of a specter or a chimera, but as a concrete, precise, unassailable memory. Every face. Every scream. Every drop of blood shed. Every gaze I had avoided. Every hand I had failed to hold. This world would give them back to me, one by one, like debts being claimed a hundredfold.

And at the end of it all... it would demand the unthinkable.