Anthesis of Sadness
Chapter 159: I Fell the Way One Ceases to Hope

Chapter 159: I Fell the Way One Ceases to Hope

I stepped back. A single step, barely marked, barely willed — but enough. An instinctive, thoughtless step, coming from far away, from those zones of the body that remember before the soul, that refuse even before thought can formulate refusal. It wasn’t fear. Nothing sharp, nothing panicked, nothing theatrical. No. It was something else.

It was the exhaustion of an animal that no longer wants to growl, bite, or flee. It was that minimal gesture of a being hunted for too long, who no longer believes in escape but still can’t help backing away when the world comes too close.

That step, I hadn’t decided it. It had been torn from me by an ancient reflex, an automatic refusal — not of the thing before me, but of everything. Of embrace. Of softness. Of echo.

I wasn’t stepping back from a threat. I was stepping back from the idea that I could still be loved.

As for the silhouettes... they were still there, still motionless, still silent, but their eyes — or rather those cavities inhabited by a dull light, almost uterine — hadn’t looked away. No. They were still watching me. All of them. Together. Unanimously.

As if this world, despite my screams, despite my refusals, despite my falls, had never tired of seeing me.

But it wasn’t a gaze that condemned. Not a gaze that judged or demanded. There was neither anger in their stillness, nor accusation in their light, nor reproach in their silence.

There was only one thing.

A sadness.

A dense, abyssal, intangible sadness, like a grief one no longer even knows how to name. Not sorrow for what I had done — but sorrow for what I had become. A sadness so bare it became unbearable.

They saw something, I was certain. Something in me I refused to recognize. Something I could barely feel trembling beneath the surface, but which I stubbornly kept burying, covering, trampling.

They saw it.

That fragment of childhood fossilized in my marrow. That memory so ancient it no longer had a shape, a date, a face, but which still cried, somewhere, deep in a forgotten fold.

And their sadness... it wasn’t about having lost me.

It was about knowing I had lost myself.

A single thought, thick, formless, but more real than anything I had ever felt before, imposed itself on my mind, not as a choice but as an absolute impulse, a primal call: run.

Run from all this. Run from this presence. Run from this world that no longer even screamed, but was still watching me.

I couldn’t take it anymore. Not one more second. Not one more breath.

So I turned on my heels, without thinking, without slowing, without even daring to look behind me — because I already knew what I would see: not monsters, not judges, not hostile shadows.

No. Worse than that.

I would see expectation. Invitation. Patience.

And I couldn’t bear it.

I started to run.

One step, then another, then a hundred. My legs sliced through the air as if they remembered a freedom I had never known, as if momentum could erase weight, heat, memory.

I ran — not to escape danger, not to save my life, but because running was all I had left.

A way to scream without opening my mouth. A way to bleed without a wound. A way to say: I refuse.

My breath was ragged, flayed with every inhale as if the air itself had become a blade.

My heart trembled, not from fatigue but from too many things to hold in.

And my throat... my throat knotted, tight, burning — not from pain, not from fear, not even from anger.

But from... something.

Something indescribable. Something incomplete, barely formed, but already alive.

An inner presence, a black substance under my tongue, between my lungs, in my belly. A shapeless form. A wordless voice. A cry not yet born but already pounding against the walls of my mind.

A beast, maybe. A memory. Or just... a remainder.

And I knew, even as I ran, even as I silently screamed through that light too white, too tepid, too soft — I knew, as one knows things without ever formulating them:

That something...

Would never leave me.

I collapsed to the ground, not in a brutal gesture, not in a tragic spasm, but with the crushed slowness of things one no longer tries to hold back, as if every fiber of my body had finally accepted the exhaustion.

As if the very momentum of living had dissolved in the air, abandoned without complaint or drama, simply... yielded.

It wasn’t a fall, not a spectacular collapse, but rather an extinction, a deep, organic, total release.

My body crumpled all at once, without a cry, without resistance, like a puppet whose strings hadn’t been cut, but which the years, fatigue, and shame had slowly unraveled, until it slid from the stage on its own, too weary to perform again.

The ground absorbed me almost tenderly, warm, dense, silent, and I didn’t know whether it was the world’s matter or my own that dissolved first.

And in that inglorious slump... I was no longer standing. I was nothing but a weight. A breath. A remainder.

I gasped, mouth open like a badly stitched wound, breath ripped from my lungs as if it were a crime, every inhale seeming to strike an invisible wall at the bottom of my throat, every exhale leaving me emptier, hollower, further from myself, in that nameless fatigue that no longer stemmed from effort but from sheer persistence.

And my eyes — heavy, reddened, still swollen with tears I hadn’t finished understanding — slowly lifted toward the sky, not to seek an answer, nor a light, nor even a sign, but simply because I no longer knew where else to look, because the world around me weighed too heavily, and only up there remained a fragment of space that had not yet rejected me.

That dead sky.

That immense, immobile ceiling, devoid of any will, of any trace of storm or clarity, a mute dome stretched above me like gray skin over a drum no hand would ever strike again.

It held no anger, no compassion, no shape.

Just... nothing.

Nothing but a silence too vast to ignore, too dense to breathe.

A void that, paradoxically, still enveloped me.

I remained there, lying on that tepid ground that was neither hard nor soft, not knowing whether it was by choice, by weariness, or simply because I could no longer do otherwise, limbs numb, breath fragile, and that strange sensation, as if everything around me had started to slow, as if the world had stopped turning without warning, had wrapped me in a shroud of anesthetic gentleness.

For a long time.

Or maybe not. I no longer knew. I no longer wanted to know.

Time, here, was nothing but a slow fiction, a shapeless illusion, a pool of disordered perceptions where each second unraveled from the next, where moments no longer followed but dissolved, faded, as if memory itself had stopped counting.

There was no before. No after. Only a present stretched to the absurd, suspended somewhere between abandonment and forgetting.

In that silence that no longer carried anything external, in that soft bubble where even breaths seemed held, it was a thought — no, not a mystical flash, not a divine illumination, just a naked, raw, ragged thought — that rose within me, from the deepest part, from that zone I believed dried out long ago, and yet still spoke, still roared, still thrashed: fucking world.

Yes. Fucking world.

A world too soft, too slow, too full of light where I wanted only oblivion. A world that still held me.

And then, like a mental cry, like an echo rising from my marrow more than my breath, the question surged — not articulated, not formulated, but hurled with a dull violence, a fatigue screaming inside:

Why?

Why did it have to be him? That twisted god, incomprehensible, pathologically compassionate, that god of misfortune, of forced caress, that fucked-up god who had dared to reach out his hand.

Why had he brought me back here? Why had he believed I could still be saved, still be touched, still be... rebuilt?

And in that brutal surge, that raw burst of injustice, the question became a scream, became a wound, became a spray of hatred vomited within myself — WHY?! —

But it wasn’t my voice screaming.

It was my throat. It was my lungs. It was my breath torn by invisible blades, spat into air too dense to carry it, as if even rage no longer had room to fully exist here, as if my fury, my refusal, my breakage were nothing more than the death-rattle of a beast stitched back together against its will.

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