Anthesis of Sadness

I fell on my back, without strength, without any will to get up, as if every attempt to stand had been abandoned in some ancient sigh. The astral ground, that strange and shifting matter, gently bent beneath my weight, without resistance, like a dead sea, frozen in an unhealthy calm, welcoming not with tenderness but with indifference. And I let myself be rocked. Not to be comforted. But because there was nothing else to do. Because exhaustion had replaced every other sensation.

Then, without warning, without control, without filter, I screamed.

Not once.

Not twice.

But again. And again. And again. Like a wild pulsation. Like a scream that no longer sought to be heard but to be expelled. To force out what could no longer come out. What my flesh still wanted to hold onto, in a final reflex of integrity. What my throat no longer knew how to contain: the fire, the shame, the grief, the hatred. Everything that had boiled for too long in silence, too deeply to find a language.

I screamed until I felt my throat tighten, until each breath burned like poison. Until my lungs seemed about to collapse in on themselves. And when the sound no longer came out, when the breath could no longer rise to the edge of my lips, the scream continued. Inside. Mute. Deaf. But even more violent. A voiceless scream, one that made the inside tremble, that tore at the conscience without making the slightest sound.

And then, slowly, my mind drifted away. It didn’t leave my body. It sank. Into me. Toward a depth deeper than depth. My strength left me too, but not in a brutal collapse — no, they left like an apology. As if they were ashamed to still inhabit that body. As if even my energy wanted to abandon me.

I fell. But not into sleep. Not into peace. There was no rest possible. I fell into a void. A place without shape, without sound, without air. A space that did not speak its name. Where nothing would vibrate again. Where even despair seemed to have fled, as if it too had understood that it was too much. That nothing here was worth being consumed anymore.

I woke up. But it wasn’t a return to consciousness as we understand it. It wasn’t the gentle emergence of a fading dream, nor the cold shiver of a body pulled from sleep. That awakening came from a murkier, more viscous place, a corner of the soul where one does not truly sleep, where one floats in a compact, thick, saturated silence. An inner silence, not that of the world around, but the one that settles inside when even the screams have given up, when even pain has stopped seeking the words to exist.

That silence, I knew it. It was the one of empty rooms after departures. The one of battlefields after the bodies have ceased. The one that does not console, that does not welcome, that only leaves space for a form of devouring, absolute, almost clean absence. It had that strange taste of incomplete ending, of an echo cut short, as if the story had been interrupted by an outside hand and all that remained was to contemplate the void.

And it was from there, from that formless place, without thought, without me, that I slowly rose, without knowing whether it was a jolt or a compulsion.