Anthesis of Sadness

I had crossed the bridge — or what passed for a bridge — and already, behind me, it had vanished, not like an object that disappears, but like a memory the world refuses to keep. It didn’t collapse. It didn’t fold. It simply decomposed, slowly, in a viscous silence, as if nothing had ever been there, as if the crossing itself had existed only for me, for a single passage, before being returned to the organic void from which it had emerged.

A memory that didn’t want to stay. Or perhaps a sign that this world only accepted motion — not traces.

As for the world... it thickened again, gently, imperceptibly at first, then with a more marked slowness, almost viscous, as if space itself was growing heavier around me. The ground became dense again, almost pulpy under my feet, filled with a soft and vibrant substance, neither stone nor flesh, something between moss and membrane, which seemed to absorb each of my steps with clammy complacency. The walls too drew closer, not like a trap, not with that direct hostility one immediately recognizes, but with a form of imposed intimacy, suffocating, like a body too close you hadn’t chosen. And with each step, I slipped further into a narrowing corridor, more constricted, more organic with every meter, as if I were sinking into a vegetal throat, warm and foreign, passing through a living architecture that hadn’t been designed for me, yet still swallowed me all the same.

And yet, something in it recognized me. An acceptance without tenderness, without anger. As if I were expected, not desired but tolerated, like a parasite the host body decides not to reject.

In front of me, I saw her.

A surface. Smooth. Convex. Almost liquid in the way it reflected light without truly returning it — as if it absorbed it, smothered it, digested it slowly in its curves. It emerged in the center of the corridor, rising from a tangle of fibers and vegetal flesh, and yet... it was not part of it. It resembled nothing else here. It stood out, yes, with an almost brutal obviousness, like an anomaly the world itself had failed to hide. It was there, blatant, set in the heart of the organic like an artificial certainty, a soft and mute excrescence that didn’t even try to blend into the living — and that was precisely what made it unsettling.

It didn’t try to exist. It was simply there. Unmovable. Unexplainable. Like a verdict laid down without justification.

It was a wall, yes — but not a neutral wall, not a simple transitional surface.

It was a reflection.