Anthesis of Sadness

I walked. Not really out of will, nor out of faith, nor even out of need. I walked because my legs seemed to remember in my place, because my body, emptied of meaning, kept imitating the motion, chaining steps like a worn-out mechanism incapable of admitting it was broken.

I no longer knew if it was me moving forward... or if it was the world, slowly, sluggishly, dragging me ahead, pushing me from beneath, as if it refused to let me collapse completely. My feet didn’t really touch the ground — they brushed it, slid over it, barely grazed it, carried by a troubled, foreign inertia, almost clammy.

And in this movement without purpose, without direction, without name, I vaguely felt that something was moving me — not a force, not an order — but a gentle and sinister will, as if this very world had decided to take me elsewhere, in my place.

I drifted. Slowly. Silently. Like a memory too old to be named, too heavy to fade. I floated in this world without edge, without center, without rhythm — a matrix suspended outside of time, saturated with a sweetness so constant it became suffocating, like a clammy cocoon one can no longer leave.

Everything seemed frozen here, not by absence, but by a presence too full — a formless, relentless warmth, a tenderness that didn’t bite, but held, that clung, that refused to let go. It wasn’t a hell of flames. Nor of chains.

It was worse.

A hell of love. A hell of calm gestures, of compassionate silences, of embraces that aren’t pushed away but can no longer be endured. A hell without violence, but with arms always open. Always ready. Always there.

And this trap... it was mine. My own hell. Woven from my lacks, my memories, my regrets. A gentle hell. And thus, indestructible.

But... was it really hell? I was no longer certain. Maybe not. Maybe so. Maybe that word too had ended up losing its meaning, eroded by too much use, too many prayers, too many broken promises.

ᴛʜɪs ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀ ɪs ᴜᴘᴅᴀᴛᴇ ʙʏ ɴoᴠel Fɪre.nᴇt

I no longer knew. I didn’t even know what "knowing" meant.

I wasn’t sure I understood what the word "hell" still referred to — a place? a punishment? a state of mind? a memory too precise? I didn’t know.