Anthesis of Sadness

I kept climbing, slowly, not out of weakness but out of a refusal to speed up, as if each step had to be chosen, assumed, torn from the slope. It wasn’t exhaustion that slowed me down. It was something else. A more diffuse, older weight. A kind of inner resistance, almost sacred, that wanted me to feel each degree, each roughness, each beat of air as proof that I was not fleeing.

And yet, even the air, that breath supposedly meant to support the effort, seemed to have turned against me. It helped nothing. It oppressed. It clung to the skin like an invisible fever, clammy and insidious, seeping into the nostrils, into the throat, down to the depths of the lungs, to deposit a film of soft but constant asphyxiation — a suffocating sensation that didn’t kill, but gnawed slowly, patiently, as if the atmosphere itself refused to carry me.

Each step seemed to slip under my feet like a polished tongue of mother-of-pearl, treacherous, excessively smooth, as if the staircase itself did not accept my ascent.

As I progressed, something changed in me — not a sharp pain, not a clear alarm, but a dull, insidious tension that settled into my shoulders and pulled them backward, as if an invisible weight was already clinging to my shoulder blades.

It was too early to be fatigue. Too precise to be a simple malaise. It was something else, deeper, older — perhaps a presence, or a memory, curled up in my back, weighing down without form, without voice, but very real, as if it wasn’t me climbing, but a heavier version of myself, laden with everything I still refused to name.

I was carrying nothing, and yet, each step felt like I was lifting more than just my own body — as if, silently, without realizing it, something had latched onto me, something intangible, massive, deeply intimate.

It wasn’t a burden one could see. It wasn’t a bag, nor an identifiable load. It was a shapeless weight, but omnipresent. That of unspoken thoughts. Of pains we believe we’ve passed through. Of absences carried for too long.

An invisible mass, yet so heavy it bent me without even touching my shoulders, slowed me without my muscles understanding why.

Once again, on my path, something came to break the uniformity — a discreet but irrefutable anomaly, forming in the distance, just enough to disturb the climb.

I didn’t know what it was. I couldn’t make out outlines or precise colors, but it was there, a shape, a tremor, a crack in the monotony of the scenery, as if the world, for a moment, had decided to inscribe a doubt on my trajectory.

On a suspended platform, where several staircases converged like branches of a forgotten network, it lay.