Anthesis of Sadness

In front of me, without a sound, without a call, without even resistance, the path opened again — or maybe it had never stopped existing, simply masked by my panic, hidden by my escape, swallowed by that too-human pain that blinded me to the point of collapse. It was there now, wide, curved, tracing an uncertain trajectory through the void like a silent invitation, like a thread stretched between two points of forgetting.

A long islet, suspended in the void, stretched beneath my hesitant steps. Its narrow body floated above an infinite abyss, where star corpses drifted endlessly — not burning stars, not extinguished suns, but ghosts of light, embers frozen in the void, suspended like celestial memories left to drift, slowly swallowed by a silence that nothing — not cry, not breath, not prayer — seemed able to cross.

The ground beneath me was not solid. It was not made of rock, wood, earth, or even dream. It was... translucent. Almost diaphanous. A glass surface, yes — but not smooth glass, not clear glass. A clouded glass, milky, streaked with opaque veins, as if the memory of a fog had been frozen in its very texture. And deep in this glass, deeply embedded in its core, shone filaments — thin, fragile, phosphorescent — resembling living nerves, nerves of a world still beating, glowing in slow, steady pulses, as if this path held its own memory, an underground consciousness, a breath.

And I, without understanding why, placed my foot.

And with each step — each tiny advance, each shift of my weight forward, each hesitant contact between the sole of my foot and this material too soft, too aware — something vibrated. Not around me. Not in the air. Not in this void suspended between things.

But in me.

A sound without vibration, a resonance without wave. A deep, dark inner echo, like a muffled wave that traveled through the marrow of my bones, rose along my spine, ricocheted against my ribcage, faded in the hollow of my temples before returning, tirelessly. Each step didn’t strike a surface: it entered me. Each step awakened something knotted, ancient, forgotten — as if I wasn’t walking on an external path, but on a secret, inverted map, drawn into my own memory.

I wasn’t walking on a road.

I was walking on the nerves of the world.

And then, I saw her.

There, at the center of the void, at the heart of that suspended orbit where nothing seemed to have been placed, she was there — motionless, curled up, set on the world like a thought too old to still be thought, like a memory that had taken form without ever being spoken. She didn’t move. She didn’t need to. Her stillness alone was enough to bend the air around her.