Anthesis of Sadness

I don’t hear them. I don’t read them. They don’t reach me through the ear or the eye. But I feel them. Not like one feels a thought rising. No. Not that cognitive push, predictable, guided by a need for meaning. It’s something else. Older. More basal. Like sensing a fever in the tongue before the body even acknowledges it. A strange heat, persistent, not painful but intrusive, lodged in the back of the mouth, in the gums, beneath the palate, at the exact spot where the breath folds before becoming sound. And what’s pushing there, gently, without jolt but without pause, has nothing of a symptom. It’s a presence.

And this presence asks nothing of me. It doesn’t push, doesn’t devour, demands neither listening nor confession. It simply waits, like one waits for the sap to rise, like one waits for the weight of winter to leave the branches without even noticing. It is there, without threat, without gentleness, without intention. But its mere existence creates a tension. A space to be filled. An inverted promise: that one day, I will have to respond — not to a question, but to a quiver. To a trace. To a form already written into my fibers.

And this presence... knows me. Not like one knows someone. Not like a memory returning. But like a posture never left. A way of holding oneself without thinking. A tilt of the head, a palm closed too quickly, a shoulder slightly lower than the other. What pushes there — this word, this breath, this voice to come — does not emerge from the present. It comes from blind spots. From zones I’ve abandoned. From fragments of myself I’ve stopped questioning. From gestures worn by repetition, made invisible even to my own gaze. It comes from there. From what I’ve continued to be without seeing myself.

There’s no revelation in this emergence. Only an exposure. A turned surface. A mirror without reflection forcing me to guess what I’ve always carried without looking at it. Maybe that’s what true language is, in the end: not what we name, but what we’ve never stopped becoming without saying it.

And yet... it speaks. Or rather: it wants to speak. Not to reveal a secret. Not to expose a fault. But to say exactly what I’ve never been able to formulate. And that’s what breaks me more than any pain. It’s not the fear that it might say something horrible. It’s the terror that it might say something true. Just enough. Just what is needed. Just what I never had the courage to hear aloud.

I feel their shape. The words. Not their content. Their movement. Their arrangement. A muted cadence, an inner swaying, as if language had found its place without waiting for me. As if my mouth had become a shell, and meaning, already formed elsewhere, came to settle there from the inside, by capillarity, by silent recognition.

And the more I feel them assemble, the more I fall apart. It’s my very architecture that wavers. Not a thought, not a belief, but the soft matter linking my silences to my gestures, my unspoken things to my ways of sitting, of turning my eyes, of breathing out of time. I feel my mental joints slacken, my fuzzy attachments, my invisible scaffolding — all that I built to avoid having to speak — falter under the insistence of a speech that never needed me to exist.

As if my silence, once structural, were becoming brittle. As if every syllable prepared by a foreign memory were undermining the foundations of my muteness. I no longer keep quiet. I crack. And in every crack, there’s a word waiting. Not ready to come out. Ready to take root.

So I freeze. Not like one protects oneself. But like one avoids betraying. I hold my breath, I close my jaw, I swallow all pulses. Not to prevent a scream. But to guard the secret of what I’ve never known how to say. Because if I open now, if I let this trembling breath pass through, it won’t be me speaking. Not the me I know. It will be the other. The one from before. The one from elsewhere. The one from underneath. The one I covered with silence. The one I learned to ignore.

He doesn’t return. He doesn’t emerge. He never disappeared. He just stopped knocking. But today, he no longer knocks: he slips. He seeps. He blends into my tissues like an old fever that doesn’t kill but distorts, curves, blurs. I thought him extinguished, I thought I had a choice. But it’s not a voice returning. It’s a me I covered with walls.