Anthesis of Sadness

I was fleeing, not in that animal jolt instinct demands when death approaches, nor in that lucid tension still searching for an exit deep in the maze, but in a deeper movement, perhaps more cowardly, surely more human — a dull, visceral drive, incapable of stating a goal, a cause, a strategy; I was fleeing so I wouldn’t hear anymore, so I wouldn’t feel anymore, so I wouldn’t be that body loaded with images, with faces, with screams I no longer wanted to carry; I was fleeing, not to save myself, not even to understand what I had become, but simply to cover the collapse under a veil of movement, to mask the shipwreck with an absurd run, so that if not redemption, there would at least be forgetting.

The contact of the Firstborn still burned on my skin, like an invisible but persistent mark, a thermal memory etched into my pores.

But that wasn’t where the pain took root — it was underneath, deeper, dirtier, in a place I could neither name nor reach, a dark zone of myself I thought forgotten and which, nonetheless, still pulsed, reopened, flayed raw by his mere presence.

It hurt with an old, familiar, shameful pain — not a sharp wound, not a scream, but a slow corrosion, a mute, persistent bite, as if something inside me remembered too well what it never wanted to feel again, and that memory refused to die.

I jumped from one islet to the next without looking, without measuring the space or the void between the forms, like you cross a dream in free fall, without taking the time to think about what each step implies.

I wasn’t thinking anymore — or rather, I refused to, as if the slightest thought might crack the little silence I still had left inside.

And I didn’t feel anything anymore either, not the ground beneath my feet, nor the air on my skin, not even the pain still screaming somewhere — I had pushed everything away, drowned in an absurd, automatic, almost animal movement, just to stop existing altogether.

The world was becoming blurry, not like when you lose grip in a dream, but in a more insidious, more intimate way, as if everything around me — the shapes, the lines, the perspectives — was gently melting under my steps, dissolving into a shifting, trembling matter unable to stand upright.

It was a world turned liquid, unstable, porous, and the more I ran, the more the outlines receded, dissolved, as if reality itself, weary, refused me, refused to hold me, refused to keep playing this cruel game of pretending one belongs somewhere.

I finally reached a broader space, a sort of plain suspended outside reality, flat, smooth, almost neutral, as if the world had decided here to sculpt nothing anymore.

A strange light reigned there — grey, diffuse, with no apparent source, no direction or origin — a light without warmth, without intent, a clarity that illuminated nothing but emptiness, a pale, worn glow, as if only the memory of dawn remained, as if even light, in this place, had given up being alive.