Anthesis of Sadness
Chapter 170: A Motherless Memory

Chapter 170: A Motherless Memory

My family...?

I had one, didn’t I? On Earth. Somewhere. Surely. That’s what we’re supposed to have. An origin. A home. A line behind us. I must have known that. A mother. A father. A presence, at least. A name whispered with tenderness. A shared meal. A voice gently scolding me. Something. Someone.

And yet...

I saw nothing.

Nothing precise. Nothing warm. Nothing stable. Not even a blurry silhouette. Not even a scent. Not a room. Not a burst of laughter. Nothing came up. Even forcing it, even diving deep inside myself, there was only white. A wall without cracks. A silent screen.

Why?

Why did that particular void choke me? Why did that precise absence, that singular gap, that gaping hole at the center, freeze me more than all the nightmares endured, more than all the monsters faced, more than all the deaths dodged? Why did that hollow, that simple hollow, make me want to scream louder than blood, louder than fear?

I didn’t understand.

I fled. Even here. Even this. Even that memory. Or that absence of memory. I could feel it, in my bones, in my nape, in my tongue: something refused to rise. Something I had rejected. Crushed. Forgotten from having tried too hard to remember it.

And that refusal... that silence... broke me.

Because I couldn’t.

Not even that.

Not even remember... those who should have been the first faces. The first hands. The first words.

And that was the worst part.

Not the war.

Not the death.

Not the loneliness.

But that void.

The one that carried my name, with no one left to say it.

And I stayed there.

Thinking.

For a long time. Far longer than I would have thought possible. Far longer than a coherent thought, or even a memory, could last. I stayed there, motionless, silent, not even breathing beyond the surface, letting my mind turn in on itself, again, again, again — until every idea lost its shape, every memory dissolved, every certainty wrinkled.

I was thinking, yes... but not about something. Not to search. Not to understand. Just out of habit. Like a machine that no longer has a purpose but keeps running, in the void, so as not to shut down. My mind eroded itself on the same stones, returned to the same shadows, the same holes.

It had become a loop.

A slow, worn-out spiral, where each thought only brought the next back to the starting point, as if time itself had frozen inside me. Even the silence wore me down. Not the silence of words. The one that pulses inside. The one you hear between two heartbeats. The one that clings to the skin when nothing comes for you anymore.

I was getting used to the fatigue.

That’s the worst part. I no longer fought it. I didn’t even hope for it to leave. It had become a background. A texture. An atmosphere. It held me, contained me, almost rocked me. A cocoon of weariness so dense it became familiar. Almost gentle.

And I stayed there.

Endlessly.

Without expectation.

Without a name.

I was weary.

But with a weariness vaster than the body, duller than boredom, older than pain. I was weary even of doing nothing, of thinking nothing, of expecting nothing. Weary of the void, weary of breath, weary of this torpor that held me like a tepid sea in which one stops swimming simply because the shore is no longer visible. Weary of waiting — that waiting that said nothing, promised nothing, never ended. Weary of absence, not only of others, but of myself, of my outlines, of my reasons.

Weary... of me.

Of what I had become. Of what I no longer was. Of that blurry figure I wore like a faceless mask. I would have liked to fall asleep standing, to vanish without a gesture, to melt without a cry into that nothingness that had already adopted me as its own.

So, without a jolt, without clear reason, without even the idea that there could be an after, a change, a continuation — I stood up.

Not like one gets up.

But like one slides out of a dream too long.

A simple movement. Without momentum. Without meaning. Almost mechanical. A silent jolt of something that, perhaps, refused to die completely.

I left the cocoons.

With slow steps. Slippery. As if my legs still hesitated to respond, as if the air itself weighed against my ankles, as if something — silently, without truly holding me back — refused to let me go. They didn’t hold me. But they didn’t let me leave either. I felt their presence, no longer as a place, but as an imprint, a dull dampness clinging to my skin, like the sweat of a nightmare from which you never truly wake.

Their vibrations were still there.

No longer around. But within me.

They had seeped beneath the surface, had found their way to my nerves, my bones, my organs. They still pulsed, discreetly, deeply, like a forgotten breath refusing to extinguish. An installed shiver. A tepid, continuous tension, no longer expressed through jolts but through a presence — fine, constant, inalterable.

I felt it in my spine.

A diffuse beat between my shoulder blades.

A strange warmth nestled in the hollow of my belly.

Like a wordless music. An ancient melody, foreign, but recognized by my body as a chant from before. Something organic. Sacred, maybe. A flesh memory my mind would have wanted to erase, but my body, it, refused to forget.

I still carried their rhythm.

Even outside.

Even after.

And that damn sound...

Still there.

BOOM.

BOOM.

BOOM.

A dull shock, regular, muffled — but inevitable. Not a noise. Not a vibration. An impact. Rhythmic. Visceral. Too deep to come from outside, too insistent to entirely belong to my body. It resonated everywhere. In the air. In my temples. In my heels. In my chest. BOOM. BOOM. Again. Always. Like a heart that refused to die. Like a drum buried beneath the world. Like a presence pounding from within.

The heartbeat of the world.

Or maybe mine.

I no longer knew. I no longer distinguished the origin. I no longer wanted to. I no longer searched. Even doubt was too heavy. So I let it beat. I let it be. I no longer had the strength to decide what came from me and what invaded me.

But I kept going.

One step.

Then another.

Always straight ahead. Not by choice. Not by will. Just because I had to. Because stillness would have broken me otherwise. Because movement, even empty, at least had the advantage of wearing me out.

Toward what?

I had no idea.

But I moved forward.

Toward silence, maybe.

Toward that blank space where the beating would stop. Where everything would finally end. Where even the noise of myself would go quiet. Where there would only be air. Or nothing.

At last...

I hoped so.

And that hope, so faint, so thin, still held me upright.

I walked.

Or maybe I drifted. It was blurry. Slow. Without momentum. A progression without real direction, as if my legs followed an impulse older than me, wearier than thought. I wasn’t walking to go somewhere. I walked because stopping felt worse.

I crossed that extinguished world once more.

That territory without outlines, without sky, without end — that fossilized dream where light no longer shone, where shadows no longer even bit, a frozen in-between, deserted, hollow, inhabited only by the remnants of me. I knew that place. I had walked it a hundred times, maybe a thousand. And every step had left a mark no one would ever see.

An endless dream.

A nightmare drained of fear. A world too slow to frighten anymore. Too tepid to kill. Too soft, almost, in its way of numbing. A forgetfulness spread across infinity, painless, shapeless, but suffocating nonetheless.

A tepid womb.

Yes. That was it. A womb of oblivion. A matrix without love, without promise. Something that wrapped me not to keep me, but to slowly extinguish me. As if I had returned inside a world that never wanted to bring me into the world.

And yet, I still walked.

In that limp nothingness. In that motherless memory.

And in front of me... it was there.

An islet.

Solitary. Massive. Suspended alone in the abyss, like a forgotten fragment of the world carried by nothing, pulled by nothing, explained by nothing. It didn’t fall. It didn’t rise. It floated. Motionless. Frozen in an ancient sleep, levitating for no reason in that space without wind, without sky, without clear light.

It looked like a dream stopped in the middle of a sentence.

A materialized silence.

A word too heavy to be spoken.

Nothing connected it to anything. No roots. No bridges. No signs of passage. It was an island without origin, without path, without promise of return. It rested there, in the void, like a fossilized secret, frozen in a forgetfulness so deep that even the gods, perhaps, had erased it from their memory.

It seemed to wait.

Or rather: it seemed not to have waited for anyone in a long time.

Its surface, at first smooth, revealed here and there fissures, light cracks, as if time had tried to scratch its mark, to wear it down, to reduce it to nothing — without ever quite succeeding. A pale whiteness, almost spectrally clean, covered the stone, a whiteness of dust or ash, like a garment too old to dare wash.

It was there.

Intact, and yet gnawed.

Forgotten, and yet present.

And looking at it, a thought crossed me without words: something, here, had been left for me.