Anthesis of Sadness

I woke up.

Not with a jolt.

Not with a start.

But like one slowly rising from a drowning, helped by a silence too dense, too stuck to the eyelids to be truly left behind. It wasn’t a return — not yet. More like a transition. A slow, blurry push from one world to another, with that grey blur between the two sticking to the skin like an old fever. My body wasn’t following. Or if it was, it did so with that strange delay one feels after a fall, when the limbs seem to respond with a different rhythm, softer, more distant, as if they still doubted whether they truly had to start living again.

Even the air seemed too thick. Too warm. Too alive. As if every particle vibrated with a memory I didn’t have. And yet, it was there, around me, insistent, almost heavy, with that particular weight of places that examine you before letting you stay. I didn’t move right away. My breath, however, searched for a rhythm, groped, held back by I-didn’t-know-what fear still lurking under the ribs. Not a precise fear. Not an identifiable threat. But that murky premonition you sometimes get when you wake up, for no reason, when the world seems too calm, too suspended, too ready to close in on you if you dare move.

Deep inside me... something was already stirring. A formless thought. A sensation older than me, coming from a place where memories have no face yet. As if another version of myself had woken up before me, and was waiting, sitting in the shadows, patient, with that look one gives a lost brother.

I gently lifted my head. Not like someone deciding to move, but like someone being slowly pulled, by a voiceless call from below. A mute tension in the neck, in the upper back, as if something wanted to straighten me up, make me see, tear me away from stillness. My muscles barely trembled. Not from fatigue, but from hesitation. As if they too sensed that movement would change everything.

There was no one.

But I knew immediately that something had remained.

Not a presence. Not really. No breath, no warmth, none of those signs you feel when a body brushes past you or still watches. It was fainter. More diffuse. Deeper. An impression lodged just beneath the skin, precisely where sensory memories are born, those that don’t think, but react.

A trace.