Anthesis of Sadness
Chapter 142: The Islets of the Lost Soul

Chapter 142: The Islets of the Lost Soul

I fell on my back, without strength, without any will to get up, as if every attempt to stand had been abandoned in some ancient sigh. The astral ground, that strange and shifting matter, gently bent beneath my weight, without resistance, like a dead sea, frozen in an unhealthy calm, welcoming not with tenderness but with indifference. And I let myself be rocked. Not to be comforted. But because there was nothing else to do. Because exhaustion had replaced every other sensation.

Then, without warning, without control, without filter, I screamed.

Not once.

Not twice.

But again. And again. And again. Like a wild pulsation. Like a scream that no longer sought to be heard but to be expelled. To force out what could no longer come out. What my flesh still wanted to hold onto, in a final reflex of integrity. What my throat no longer knew how to contain: the fire, the shame, the grief, the hatred. Everything that had boiled for too long in silence, too deeply to find a language.

I screamed until I felt my throat tighten, until each breath burned like poison. Until my lungs seemed about to collapse in on themselves. And when the sound no longer came out, when the breath could no longer rise to the edge of my lips, the scream continued. Inside. Mute. Deaf. But even more violent. A voiceless scream, one that made the inside tremble, that tore at the conscience without making the slightest sound.

And then, slowly, my mind drifted away. It didn’t leave my body. It sank. Into me. Toward a depth deeper than depth. My strength left me too, but not in a brutal collapse — no, they left like an apology. As if they were ashamed to still inhabit that body. As if even my energy wanted to abandon me.

I fell. But not into sleep. Not into peace. There was no rest possible. I fell into a void. A place without shape, without sound, without air. A space that did not speak its name. Where nothing would vibrate again. Where even despair seemed to have fled, as if it too had understood that it was too much. That nothing here was worth being consumed anymore.

I woke up. But it wasn’t a return to consciousness as we understand it. It wasn’t the gentle emergence of a fading dream, nor the cold shiver of a body pulled from sleep. That awakening came from a murkier, more viscous place, a corner of the soul where one does not truly sleep, where one floats in a compact, thick, saturated silence. An inner silence, not that of the world around, but the one that settles inside when even the screams have given up, when even pain has stopped seeking the words to exist.

That silence, I knew it. It was the one of empty rooms after departures. The one of battlefields after the bodies have ceased. The one that does not console, that does not welcome, that only leaves space for a form of devouring, absolute, almost clean absence. It had that strange taste of incomplete ending, of an echo cut short, as if the story had been interrupted by an outside hand and all that remained was to contemplate the void.

And it was from there, from that formless place, without thought, without me, that I slowly rose, without knowing whether it was a jolt or a compulsion.

I stood up. Not in a single motion, not with the momentum of a rested body or an intact will, but slowly, like a puppet reassembled without a plan, whose movements hesitate, creak, threaten to break at every moment. My own body felt foreign, reassembled from mismatched pieces, rusted joints, coarse muscles, as if something — or someone — had tried to glue me back together hastily in the backroom of an unfinished nightmare. Nothing really stood straight. Nothing felt in place. But I was standing. And that was already too much.

So I moved again, not with strength, nor even with the rage that once carried me like a wave. It was no longer that. It was something else. A kind of slow resolution, silent, buried beneath the skin, too old to express itself, too tired to justify anything. The resolution of those who no longer believe in anything but keep walking anyway. Of those who have stopped hoping, stopped praying, even stopped complaining, but who still walk, step after step, as if that walk had become their last certainty, their last link to the real. A way not to fade. Or maybe... to fade slowly, fully aware.

My steps now were no longer mechanical, nor even organic. They were no longer gestures, but dull frictions, the rubbing of a still-living will against a void that had almost become living too. Each movement was no longer a motion, but a discreet, silent affront thrown against the absence itself — as if walking meant defying the void that swallows everything, that only asks one thing: that we stop existing to leave it room.

And with every step, I felt something leaving me. Nothing spectacular. Nothing torn. But something eroded. Small. Subtle. Almost imperceptible, like a thread slowly pulled from a fabric without knowing where it leads. But it was real. I could feel it. A memory, perhaps. A once-important word. A gaze I had once loved and which now faded to the background of my thoughts without me being able to hold onto it.

It was an inner escape, slow, irreversible. And I could do nothing about it.

This world seemed to gnaw at me from the inside, slowly, methodically, with the patience of a hungry but calm predator, a creature in no hurry, certain of its victory, that no longer even needed to run. It didn’t devour my limbs. It didn’t slash my skin. It attacked what could not be seen. It gnawed at me from below, from the soul, from the memories, from that part of me that still believed it could defend itself. And sometimes, in the most troubled moments, I imagined it as an unworthy mother, falsely gentle, falsely attentive, rocking her child with regular, almost tender gestures, while slowly sinking her teeth into the nape — not to kill, but to drain.

But no.

It wasn’t a mother.

It was never a mother.

It was a father.

An incapable father.

A failing father.

Me.

This world, this void, this nameless entity that consumes in silence... it was me. It was what I had become. What I perhaps had always been. A father who had not known how to be the shelter. A father who did not understand, did not see, did not want to see. A father who made the only daughter he should have protected from everything suffer. From everything that burns. From everything that haunts. From everything that resembles him.

And now, she bore that bite inside her.

And I had nothing left to offer her but regret.

Around me, the islets still drifted, slowly, like fragments of thought expelled from a sick mind, sliding aimlessly through a sky that was no longer a sky — a suspended space, without color, without depth, an inverted sea where nothing ever fell, where everything remained frozen waiting for an end that never came. They floated in unreality like dream bubbles, fossilized remnants of a mental world crystallized in the formaldehyde of an abandoned, distorted, eroded thought.

Some were so tiny one could only stay curled in fetal position, folded, hunched, forehead pressed to knees, like a desperate return to the original pain, a desperate attempt to go back to what one was before being broken. Uterine spaces without warmth, without wall, without heartbeat.

Others, on the contrary, were vast. Vast and misshapen. Stretched like poorly healed scars. Diffracted as if the world itself had tried to remember them and failed. And these spaces bore absurd objects, grotesquely familiar. Stuffed animals frozen in too-human poses, petrified in expressions that no longer expressed anything, their eyes slit like mouths hastily sewn shut to prevent the scream. Overturned cradles, empty but saturated with echoes, as if every breath replayed the ghosts of a vanished presence. And then those swings... suspended in the void, swaying slowly, hanging from misty chains that dangled from nothing, that frayed upward, toward the inverted maw of a bottomless sky, ready to devour everything but never digesting anything.

It was a cemetery of symbols. A mental mausoleum.

And I was still there, floating among the relics.

All those islets floated at variable distances, some close enough to almost touch, others so far they seemed lost in the shadow of a sky that held nothing, yet I was certain they were connected. Not by bridges. Not by roads. But by something more intimate, more obscure — invisible filaments, cords of flesh perhaps, stretched in the dark like the nerves of a world that refused to fully collapse, that still resisted, in its own way, complete disintegration.

I didn’t see them. Not really. But I felt them. Beneath my feet. Beneath my skin. A diffuse presence, a discreet tension, like a distant pulsation to which my body synced itself despite me. Gentle forces, almost organic, that didn’t pull, but held. Like muscles breathing slowly, something alive, imperceptibly aware, that slowed my movements, weighed them down just enough to make me doubt, to force me to listen.

And sometimes, in that imposed slowness, I felt a direction. A light pressure on my back. Not a push. A suggestion. An invisible hand placed on my shoulder blades, or maybe fine, icy fingers pressed into my spine — just deeply enough to make me believe I was still moving forward on my own, that I was still choosing, that the walk was mine.

But deep down... I wasn’t sure.

I was no longer sure of anything.

The ground, when it deigned to exist, when it materialized beneath my feet in this inconsistent reality, had the look and texture of lunar soil: cracked, gray, porous, silent like an ancient promise, left there by mistake, forgotten in some corner of the universe. It wasn’t firm, nor loose, nor even truly tangible — it evoked something between worlds, a fabric of compressed ruin.

A fine dust prevailed there, a dust of crushed bones, of memories reduced to crumbs, of reminiscences so ancient they no longer belonged to anyone. It was a composite sand, strange and dense, made of stories erased too early, of lullabies never finished, of love words whispered just before a silent, almost tender death. And me, with each step, I had the sickening feeling of trampling a lullaby. As if my soles were crushing the final breath of a love that hadn’t survived the silence.

And in all this — in that frozen decor, in that theater suspended between memory and nothingness — something reigned. A presence, yes, but more subtle, more penetrating: a smell. A smell that did not impose itself frontally, but slowly insinuated into each breath, sickly-sweet, sticky, saturated. A suffocating scent, like a blanket too heavy to push back, a strange mix of old laundry forgotten in a coffin, of soured milk left on a childhood table, of still-warm ash, as if the air itself had been woven from an abandoned love, sweet, rancid, moldy in aborted tenderness.

And always, always, that same sound. That dull, repetitive, obsessive rhythm. A deep, slow, throbbing beat, like the heart of a giant someone forgot to finish off. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. It came from nowhere. Or everywhere. Or maybe — worst of all — from myself. I could no longer swear. Everything vibrated to that tempo. The air. The light. My bones. My breath. As if my body had aligned itself despite me to the frequency of that sick matrix.

I wasn’t walking in a dream.

I wasn’t walking in death.

I was walking in the entrails of a stillborn dream.

A dream no one had wanted to bring to term. And which, nevertheless, refused to disappear.