Anthesis of Sadness
Chapter 156: A World Built to Remember

Chapter 156: A World Built to Remember

Here, in this space suspended between gentleness and damnation, nothing truly died. Not pain. Not images. Not even memories — those shreds of lived moments, gnawed by time, putrefied in the conscience, but never quite dissolved. They remained there, clinging to the air, embedded in the soft matter of this world, floating like spores of undigested childhood, ready to settle again in a breach, in a crack, in a thought left too open.

So I continued. Slowly. With that strange slowness, that almost ceremonial heaviness, found in statues that are moved one breath at a time, in the dead that are raised for their final march — not to be saved, not to be judged, but simply to be made to cross. My legs no longer carried a body. They dragged a memory. An empty form. A shell where will had dislocated, but where walking, by habit, had carried on.

I was no longer a man.

I was a remnant.

The islets, until then floating, scattered, lost in the shifting amnesia of this sick space, had drawn closer. Their slow drift had ceased to be anarchic. There had been an order. A direction. As if the world itself had decided to guide me — or to encircle me. The masses had tightened, their outlines dissolved, melted into each other with the organic softness of living tissue, until only one immense base remained.

A plateau. Wide. Flat. Crushing.

A bare expanse, without vegetation, without décor, without excuse. A floor of pale rock, cream-white with murky reflections, as if marble had been poured into lukewarm milk, and the mixture had been left there, long, very long, under the muffled pressure of a heart that had stopped beating without ever being declared dead. Nothing shone. Nothing dazzled. The light slid across it like on a skin still damp from birth.

The surface was not smooth. But it bore no wounds. No cracks. Only lines. Fine. Branched. Like petrified nerves, translucent veins embedded in the stone — not carved, not engraved, but imprisoned there, as if this ground had once wanted to feel, to vibrate, to beat... then had stopped abruptly, frozen in the premonition of vertigo. This world, I understood then, had not been built to punish. It had been built to remember. And it had never dared.

The air here vibrated.

Not like a breath, not like a wind. It vibrated from within, as if the world held its own breath, stretched in a silence too carefully crafted. Each pulse, imperceptible to the eye, could be felt in the nape, in the throat, in the hollow of the palms — a soft but persistent vibration that insinuated its presence beneath the skin, like a truth one dares not speak.

It wasn’t a murmur. It wasn’t a song.

It was a sigh.

A compressed sigh, curled in on itself, like a child’s scream wrapped in cotton to keep it from hurting. A cry turned into a whisper, muffled to the point of decency, to the morbid politeness of a pain that apologizes for still existing.

And this vibration, there, all around, also vibrated within me.

Faintly.

But enough for me to feel that this plateau did not rest on emptiness.

It rested on a memory.

The smell had changed.

No more sugar. No more milk. No more of that sticky tenderness, that musty maternal perfume that clung to the skin like a memory too warm.

No.

Here, it was something else. A leaner, drier, graver scent — the aroma of a past that no longer even tries to be forgiven. The air carried this ancient, brittle, dusty smell, like an old attic whose door had been sealed for an entire lifetime, out of forgetfulness or shame, and was suddenly reopened without the right to enter.

It was the smell of memories one has not looked at.

Sheets laid over furniture one no longer wants to name. Fibers of fabric rubbed against dry wood, against dry silence, against dead years folded in on themselves. A fragrance of withheld sighs, of echoes locked in walls too narrow.

And in this almost invisible exhalation... something was breathing.

Not a being.

A place.

A place that had waited too long.

Then I saw them.

They were there.

Not emerging. Not appearing like in a delayed dream. No. They were not born of my gaze, nor summoned by my turmoil. They were simply there. Already there. Perhaps always present — as if they had waited for me without urgency, without need, just with that spectral patience old presences have, standing in dead light, frozen in obviousness, arranged in a circle on the milky marble of the plateau like dissolved remnants of a forgotten ritual.

Nothing in them trembled. Nothing called out. And yet, everything in me retracted under the weight of a recognition too ancient to be put into words.

Silhouettes. Thin. Blurred. On the edge of reality. As if they were less beings than abandoned intentions, sketches of memory a distracted god had left to dry there, on the edge of the world. They stood neither too far nor too close. At that exact distance where the heart hesitates — where one no longer knows if one is awaited... or judged.

They did not threaten. They did not extend their arms. They watched. Silently. By their mere presence. And that was enough. For their silence was not empty. It was saturated. Dense, bare, undeniable, they were there as one is at the threshold of a truth.

I could not count them. I did not want to count them. Their number wavered with each heartbeat — a dozen? a hundred? — as if the world itself adapted their presence to my gaze, to my fear, to my threshold of denial. Too many to be ignored. Not enough to be grasped. And always... motionless.

Their skin — if that word still had meaning — seemed made of an impossible material to name: damp chalk, tarnished mother-of-pearl, ash compacted by the weight of ages. A texture both soft and friable, almost erasable, as if the idea of their presence could crumble if I blinked.

They were not living bodies. But they were not corpses either. Rather... remnants of human forms. Attempts suspended in an in-between. Lives begun, never concluded. Sketches. Fragments.

And above all, no face. No mouth to speak. No brow to furrow. Nothing to latch onto. Just these strange cavities, full of pale light, constant, without emotion or focus. Not a gaze. A vigil. A fixed glow that sought nothing. That merely acknowledged.

And their bodies... their bodies belonged to nothing. Neither to childhood. Nor to adulthood. They floated in the undefined. Suspended between two forms, two languages, two eras. As if they had been drawn at the threshold of a choice... then frozen. Beings on hold. Identities never incarnated. Possibilities abandoned to their own blur.

They were not there for me.

And yet... I knew. Without the slightest doubt. Without the slightest voice. They had always seen me.

I wanted to flee. Not really by will. Not even by fear. Rather by reflex — that kind of desperate and useless impulse the body retains in memory when the soul, itself, has already understood it is too late. An animal gesture, archaic, almost grotesque in its naivety.

But as soon as that thought formed, as soon as the very idea of retreat passed through my chest like a shadow, I knew. I knew it would be pointless.

That this world — this world breathing upon me, watching me without eyes, holding me without pity — could not be fled. It did not chase. It did not slam doors. It did not imprison. It opened. Tirelessly. Entirely.

And it waited.

It could not be fled.

It had to be passed through.

And I... I had had enough. Enough of running, of falling, of getting back up, of crashing into the soft walls of this bottomless dream. Enough of wanting to break something when everything was designed to receive.

I had had enough of being held back, of struggling in silk, of imploding without making a sound.

So I stepped forward.

Without momentum. Without promise. Without glory.

One step. Then another.

As one walks toward a truth one no longer wants to refuse.