Anthesis of Sadness

I left the room without making a sound, without turning back — not out of fear, nor prudence, nor even respect — but simply because something in me, older than will, refused to cast one last glance at what had just taken place.

There would have been something indecent, perhaps, in turning around. Something impure, or desecrating. As if the simple act of seeing again could break what had been contained. Or reopen a wound that, for once, hadn’t bled.

The silence I had passed through... no longer felt like a constraint, nor a punishment inflicted by an external world, but something more intimate, more ancient, more inviolable — a deep rule, engraved somewhere between my ribs and my memory, a rule of accord, yes, but of an accord that was no longer negotiable, no longer amendable, a law without decree, without explanation, that I could no longer violate, that I could no longer transgress in this world without splitting myself apart.

I passed through the soft membrane, that living wall which had closed again after my passage, as if the world itself had wanted to seal the wound of my intrusion.

It opened again for me, slowly, almost with caution, in a mute undulation, as if it recognized something — not my name, nor my breath, but that discreet tension that now vibrated differently beneath my skin, that infinitesimal shift of my axis, that inner signature I didn’t control, but that it, perhaps, already perceived better than I did.

As if my outlines had silently deformed, as if this world — or this body — I passed through, already knew what I had just become before I even admitted it.

And as I returned to the suspended corridor, in that weightless light that seemed to float between two heartbeats, something brushed against me — imperceptible, almost absent, yet there, fleeting, insistent in its very erasure, like a vegetal feather carried by a breath that didn’t exist, like a filament fallen from the wall itself, detached without sound, without cause, simply driven by the organic logic of this world that breathed through its own membranes.

A world without nerves, but vibrating. Without words, but full of answers. A world that no longer awaited my decisions, but absorbed them.

I turned around, slowly, almost reluctantly, like one searches for a trace where one already knows there will be nothing — and indeed, there was nothing.