Anthesis of Sadness

Here, in this space suspended between gentleness and damnation, nothing truly died. Not pain. Not images. Not even memories — those shreds of lived moments, gnawed by time, putrefied in the conscience, but never quite dissolved. They remained there, clinging to the air, embedded in the soft matter of this world, floating like spores of undigested childhood, ready to settle again in a breach, in a crack, in a thought left too open.

So I continued. Slowly. With that strange slowness, that almost ceremonial heaviness, found in statues that are moved one breath at a time, in the dead that are raised for their final march — not to be saved, not to be judged, but simply to be made to cross. My legs no longer carried a body. They dragged a memory. An empty form. A shell where will had dislocated, but where walking, by habit, had carried on.

I was no longer a man.

I was a remnant.

The islets, until then floating, scattered, lost in the shifting amnesia of this sick space, had drawn closer. Their slow drift had ceased to be anarchic. There had been an order. A direction. As if the world itself had decided to guide me — or to encircle me. The masses had tightened, their outlines dissolved, melted into each other with the organic softness of living tissue, until only one immense base remained.

A plateau. Wide. Flat. Crushing.

A bare expanse, without vegetation, without décor, without excuse. A floor of pale rock, cream-white with murky reflections, as if marble had been poured into lukewarm milk, and the mixture had been left there, long, very long, under the muffled pressure of a heart that had stopped beating without ever being declared dead. Nothing shone. Nothing dazzled. The light slid across it like on a skin still damp from birth.

The surface was not smooth. But it bore no wounds. No cracks. Only lines. Fine. Branched. Like petrified nerves, translucent veins embedded in the stone — not carved, not engraved, but imprisoned there, as if this ground had once wanted to feel, to vibrate, to beat... then had stopped abruptly, frozen in the premonition of vertigo. This world, I understood then, had not been built to punish. It had been built to remember. And it had never dared.

The air here vibrated.

Not like a breath, not like a wind. It vibrated from within, as if the world held its own breath, stretched in a silence too carefully crafted. Each pulse, imperceptible to the eye, could be felt in the nape, in the throat, in the hollow of the palms — a soft but persistent vibration that insinuated its presence beneath the skin, like a truth one dares not speak.

It wasn’t a murmur. It wasn’t a song.