Anthesis of Sadness
Chapter 152: A Tenderness Without My Consent

Chapter 152: A Tenderness Without My Consent

I had believed, yes... I had believed that by jumping into the void, by giving up everything down to my last breath, by letting my body merge with absence, I would finally be free — finally torn away from this too-tight skin, from this saturated memory, from this exhaustion of being.

I had imagined that this leap, this ultimate refusal, this finger raised in the face of the universe, would be enough to untie me from everything. To cleanse me. To erase me.

But no.

This world — this moist, slow, tender and unbearable world — had not let me go. It had not slammed the door in my face. It had not screamed its verdict. It hadn’t even resisted. It had simply... caught me.

And that was its entire power.

It hadn’t grabbed me by the throat, it hadn’t imprisoned me with chains of stone or orders of iron. No. It had held me back without violence, without cry, without anger.

It had embraced me — not like a jailer ensuring their prisoner doesn’t escape, but like a worn-out parent, returned from absolutely everything, who still extends their arms... simply because they cannot do otherwise.

And since that moment — since the world had caught me without violence, since it had refused my fall — that warmth had never left me again. It had slipped into my wake like a slow breath, diffuse, inescapable, imposing itself in each of my steps without ever using force.

It was there, all the time, everywhere, like an invisible layer placed between my skin and reality. I felt it, soft and insistent, beneath my heels, on my nape, nestled between my shoulder blades like a hand that didn’t want to let go, even when I staggered.

It also slipped into every breath I stole from the too-quiet air of this world — that warmth lived in me like a stubborn ember, lodged in my chest, tucked into that fold I had never known how to name.

And it didn’t really burn — not like the fire one fears, not like the rage one dreads — no, it persisted, low and quiet, low and dim, like a tenderness that refuses to extinguish.

It had no violence, no cry. Just... that presence.

Constant. Subtle. Suffocating.

A slow, intangible embrace, that of a beloved one never invited, never begged to stay. It was a weight without mass, a pressure without gesture, an organic and mute fidelity, a love without my permission, an invasive tenderness — inextinguishable — that expected nothing, asked for nothing, but remained.

And maybe that was precisely the most unbearable part.

So I walked. Again. Not out of will, nor even out of duty — but because of the tragic certainty that stopping would be a kind of pardon, a release, a surrender I did not deserve.

It wasn’t endurance, not courage. It was a sentence I imposed on myself with every step, a punishment I wanted uninterrupted.

Because to stop, to retreat, to let myself fall into any kind of embrace, whether carnal or cosmic, would have been a betrayal. A betrayal of those I had hurt, an insult thrown in the faces of the dead, an affront slipped into the throat of my own guilt.

I did not deserve peace.

I did not deserve that soft silence the world, at times, seemed to want to offer me — like a hand laid on the forehead of a feverish child.

I did not deserve to be relieved, to have my burn erased, to be told it was over. No.

What I deserved was this endless wandering, this walk suspended between two pains, between two pulses, between two illusions.

I deserved that insidious softness, that sticky atmosphere, that limp and tepid light that clung to my skin without healing me.

I deserved that slow, continuous, silent torment.

Each step was a voluntary burden. Each breath torn from the air of this world was a punishment. Each fragment of light — laid on me with a tenderness I didn’t want — was a burn.

And deep down, in the deepest hollow of what I no longer dared call a soul, I knew it: I deserved all of this.

Absolutely all of it.

The islets, little by little, lost their chaotic strangeness. Their curves flattened, their contours became regular, too regular — as if an invisible hand, a deaf and persistent will, had undertaken to give form to wandering itself, to offer it a frame, a discreet but present path, hidden in the folds of infinity.

It wasn’t a path in the proper sense, not a road traced in chalk or light. It was an intention.

A gentle pull, sweet, almost affectionate, woven into space, into matter, into air — a disguised promise, a programmed tenderness, a caress hidden in every step.

Beneath my feet, the very texture of the world was changing. I walked through layers of frozen mist, banks of vapor solidified into silent cotton flakes, carpets of pearly moss with pinkish hues, with strangely sweet scents — smells of fermented childhood, of innocence left too long in a sealed jar.

There was, in every surface, in every shade, something perversely gentle, like a memory from before the fall, like a memory put to sleep through too much sorrow.

And further ahead, rising in the stillness of the empty sky, stood arches.

Hollow. Tall. Too tall for the fragility of their structure.

Their material seemed soft to the eye, almost limp, but it was their ornamentation that twisted my gut. Strange spirals, drawn like children’s games, lines of mute notes arranged like forgotten lullabies, and most of all... those imprints.

Imprints of small hands, pressed into the matter like into a soft belly, fossilized in a gesture of calling or surrender, left there like so many screams frozen in time.

I didn’t dare look at them. Not for long. Not really.

Something, deep within me, screamed to turn my eyes away, not to question those forms, not to listen to what those walls wanted to say.

Because I knew, with visceral certainty, that staring too long risked awakening a memory I wasn’t ready to face — or worse: a memory I had chosen to abandon, and that this world, this world sick with sweetness, wanted to force me to reclaim.

Above me, the sky was no longer truly a sky. It no longer stretched as a protective vault, nor as an infinite space to contemplate or dread.

No, it had closed in, flattened, stretched, like a skin too thin, too taut, drawn to the extreme over the invisible frame of a gigantic drum — but a mute drum, deprived of its echo, deprived of its music.

A celestial membrane, gray and milky, suspended above the world like a lid without end, without contour, without promise.

There were still no stars. No moon. No sun. No source. No direction.

Only that blurry, pulsing mass, crossed by slow, diffuse waves, almost ashamed in their regularity — like sighs of a living thing that no longer dares breathe too loud, or that breathes in spite of itself, by habit, by inertia.

And in that suspended breath, in those imperceptible ripples running through the very flesh of the sky, I felt something. A rhythm. A cadence.

Not a clock’s ticking. Not a mechanical tic-tac.

But a heart.

A heart too ancient, too vast, too foreign to be understood. It didn’t beat like a human heart. It wasn’t red. It wasn’t warm.

It was cosmic. It was fundamental. A heart of the world, maybe. Or a heart of dream.

And more than that: a gentle heart.

And it was precisely that gentleness — that tender regularity, that benevolent pulse — that I could not accept.

Because in that moment, faced with infinity, that heart seemed more dangerous to me than any hell.

And that smell... that fucking smell... came back.

It never struck like an aggression. It crawled. It infiltrated. It slid beneath the eyelids, behind the palate, into the folds of breath.

Sweet, but not like a candy — more like a rotten promise, like a caress too old left forgotten in a corner of the heart.

It was a scent of forced softness, of tenderness distilled at the wrong time, a vaguely maternal fragrance, but twisted, as if love had been locked in a bottle too tightly sealed, and for lack of air, had rotted inside.

It smelled like the embrace no one ever asked for, the warmth not deserved, that tepid and insistent presence one tries to push away but that clings, soft like a sheet soaked in memories, suffocating like a childhood blanket forgotten on an adult body.

It evoked childhood — not pure childhood, but sick childhood, decomposing childhood, with its whiffs of soured milk, damp plush toys, shivering skin in the night of a cradle too empty.

And in that smell, there was something more terrible still than fear: there was a call. A reminder. A silent plea.

As if the very air whispered:

Do you remember? Do you remember... when you could still love?

I wanted to vomit. Truly. Not in thought, not in abstract projection, but with that visceral, brutal, animal urgency — that silent cry rising from the depths of the belly, that surge of refusal, that total upheaval of the body screaming a NO louder than all prayers.

I felt the movement, the push, the momentum of rejection, like a memory of organic revolt, an echo of survival anchored in my guts.

But nothing came.

No spasm. No concrete nausea. Not even a twitch.

My body... refused. It abandoned me. Refused even that grotesque relief, that cry from the guts, that raw deliverance that might have betrayed a remaining piece of humanity.

And that’s when I understood.

It wasn’t a simple numbness, not a passing torpor, not ordinary fatigue. It was older, more deeply rooted, more serious.

I was anesthetized down to the soul. A living statue, sculpted in pain but polished by overflow, eroded by the absence of revolt.

I was a silhouette of flesh, vaguely warm, vaguely upright, no longer moved by will but by habit.

I was no longer a beast, nor a man.

I was... a remainder.

A puppet of blurry memories, kept standing by an invisible hand — not a hand that guides or directs, but a tired, absent, forgotten hand, that merely pulls a thread from time to time, by automatism, without conviction.

I drifted. I walked.

Not toward a goal. Not toward a future. Just because stopping would have been a confession. Because collapsing would have required a breath I no longer possessed.

I didn’t know where I was going.

And yet, despite everything... I continued.

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