Anthesis of Sadness

— You don’t need to remember the name, whispered the voice.

— Your body, though...

— has never forgotten.

And I stayed there.For a long time.I couldn’t say how long. Seconds? Hours? Maybe an entire lifetime, condensed into that silence. I no longer counted. I no longer really breathed. I was... frozen. Not broken. Not yet. Not soothed either. Nothing had given way. Nothing had been rebuilt. I was just... traversed. Like a bridge of flesh stretched between two worlds. Like a vulnerable channel through which something passes, without noise, without cry, but with that ancient weight one does not name. An inhabited being. Occupied. By a pain too gentle to reject. Too intimate to hate. A pain... alive.

And, slowly... very slowly... I stood up. It was not a heroic gesture. Not a surge of will. Just a movement. Born of silence. Born of what had been crossed. Every muscle vibrated, yes, but it wasn’t from fatigue. It wasn’t the exhaustion of a fight. It was something else. A kind of release. A wave. Like after a storm one has held back too long. As if my body, from holding on so much, no longer knew how to be itself again. I didn’t look one last time. I didn’t have the courage. Nor the strength. Nor the space. I had no gaze left to offer. Everything in me had already left. Or stayed. I no longer knew.

I left the sanctuary. Without noise. Without elevation. Just... in silence. My fists trembling. Not from rage, but from aftershock. As if something had etched itself into my very knuckles. My breath short, choppy, irregular — not from effort, but from this overflow of nothing, this overflow of everything. And my stomach... knotted. Knotted like a shoelace pulled too tight around a void beating inside me. A strange void. Organic. Vibrant. Like a reserve heart. A heart that pumped nothing anymore... but still beat. Just to remind that there had been something. That there was still... that lack.

And behind me... as I walked away, slowly, in muffled steps, almost backward without daring to turn around... I thought I heard something. A thread. A vibration. A note. A lullaby. Very soft. Very far. Too far to be sure. Too precise to be imagined. As if someone... was still singing. For me. Not loudly. Not to call me. Just... so I would hear. So that breath would never quite leave me. As if, despite everything... I was still being rocked. A little longer. Just enough for the absence to stay alive.

I walked. Without purpose. Without direction. Without reason. My steps followed an old, stripped rhythm, like an echo tired of itself. My throat... had no more voice. It had screamed too long. Into the void. Against walls. Against absences. It had spat out truths no one wanted to hear, screamed against a silence vaster than death, begged without ever receiving anything but the echo of its own distress. And now... it was empty. Mute. Burned out. My thoughts... had no more questions. They had exhausted all the whys, scratched all the walls of forgetting, banged against every door of a world too deaf to answer. There was nothing left to search for. Nothing left to understand. And my heart... had no more desire. It no longer demanded. It no longer dreamed. It no longer hoped. It moved forward out of habit. Out of fatigue. Out of inertia. From wandering too much. From surviving too much. From existing inside a dream that didn’t want to end... and which, perhaps, would never end.

Each step felt identical. Not similar. Identical. As if copied from the previous one, without even the effort of pretending novelty. Each islet... felt familiar. Too much so. A disturbing kind of familiar. Like a face seen too often in a dream. As if the world itself, out of weariness or gentle malice, rewrote itself under my feet with each breath, each heartbeat, replaying the same places, the same walls, the same memories — but with just enough variation to fool me a little more. To give me the illusion of movement. Of progress. Of elsewhere. I was going in circles. I knew it. I felt it. I lived it. In a twisted dream. In a conscious loop. In a memory trapped in a body that refused to be silent. A body that kept walking... even when nothing carried it anymore.