Anthesis of Sadness

I was still there, on the ground, lying in the dust of a world that no longer wanted me, or that I no longer wanted to cross. My breath came in spasms, choppy, torn out with each spasm of pain as if breathing, now, required an effort I no longer deserved. My chest barely rose, as if emptied of oxygen, as if even the air had deserted my lungs. My body, emptied of everything — of strength, of tension, of identity — was nothing more than a heap of exhaustion, a sack of torn nerves struggling to belong to itself.

My throat was raw, scraped by the screams I hadn’t been able to release or that I had screamed too much. And my heart... my heart still beat, yes, but in an absurd, erratic way, like a drum struck without rhythm, without music, without purpose — a dull, repetitive, almost insulting sound that reminded me I was still alive, even if nothing truly lived in me anymore.

In this heavy stillness, in this dull tremor that follows screams too long held, in that suspended moment after where even pain seems hesitant to remain, the air around me began to change. Slowly. Silently. It didn’t move, no. It thickened.

Not like a storm. Not like a slap. But like a slow, insidious tide, an invisible fluid rising centimeter by centimeter, seeping through the cracks of the world, through the smallest interstices of reality. It didn’t impose itself. It infiltrated.

And soon, it became almost tangible.

A substance. A presence.

Sticky, thick, clammy. A new density that slowed everything: breath, thoughts, memory. An improbable texture, between cotton wool and forgetting, between tenderness and erasure. It was soft, yes. With a suspicious velvet. With a cotton too silky. But this softness carried something insidious. A foreign fatigue. A programmed torpor.

And then, an image imposed itself, like a memory that didn’t belong to me: that of a blanket being slowly, gently, almost affectionately... pulled over the face of an infant. Not to lull it to sleep.

To extinguish it.

Just a little too long.

And in this new thickness, in this mass of air become almost flesh, almost memory, almost silence, something appeared. Slowly. Without suddenness. Without brightness. A light. Weak, floating, timid in its birth. It did not invade. It suggested. Barely perceptible at the edge of my field of vision, like a reminiscence returning from an old dream, from a dream one had deliberately repressed, denied too long for it to dare knock again.