Anthesis of Sadness
Chapter 180: I Didn’t Know How to Silence the Lullaby

Chapter 180: I Didn’t Know How to Silence the Lullaby

She advanced.

Slowly.

Not like one walks. Not like one crosses a space.

She moved with that suspended fluidity that crumples nothing, that doesn’t disturb the air, that no longer quite belongs to the world of weight or time. Each step — if there were steps — was a translation, a silent flowing toward me.

And I felt her coming.

Not like a threat.

But like a certainty.

Then, suddenly — without break, without brutality — she veered.

She moved away.

Not out of fear. Not to abandon me.

I felt it immediately, viscerally: she wasn’t fleeing.

She was leaving... for something else.

To make me walk.

To make me follow.

To guide.

Not by command, not by pity. Not even out of kindness.

But because now it was up to me to decide.

To follow her.

Or to remain there, frozen in the white, burned by the truth, consumed by what I had just been.

I didn’t want to follow her.

Everything in me opposed it. Every conscious part, every fragment still standing, screamed no into the silence. I didn’t want to. I had neither the momentum, nor the right, nor the desire. It wasn’t a decision. It was a refusal. A mute resistance. A wounded yet upright will.

But my legs... decided otherwise.

Without my command.

Without my understanding.

As if my body had ceased to belong to me. As if my instinct, or perhaps this immense fatigue, mental as much as physical, this vertigo of too much effort, too much inner war, was betraying all I had tried to keep alive. I moved forward.

One step.

Then another.

And each step behind her was an affront, a spit thrown in the face of what I was supposed to become, a break with the cherished darkness, a slap to the mask I had come to love. It was a denial. A slow, passive, implacable submission. A betrayal of myself. And yet... I continued.

Each step plunged me deeper into that sickly whiteness, that immaculate space that looked like paradise, but a paradise that was offensive, brutal in its perfection, violent in its purity.

The silence around us was absolute.

But not an empty silence.

A total silence.

Closed.

Not a breath. Not a vibration. Not even a beat of air, light, or presence.

A silence that didn’t listen.

A silence that observed.

Even my own hallucination...

That voice, that whisper, that familiar parasite that had followed me, haunted me, commented on me, gnawed at me in every space of solitude — even it had gone quiet.

And that silence...

Was not the greatest.

It was the most intimate.

The most terrible.

Because it came from within.

Because there was nothing left, inside me, to protest. Nothing left that spoke, judged, encouraged, or begged.

Even that inner fiction I sometimes called "me," that troubled part, that hallucinatory double... had faded away.

Silent.

Defeated.

Or maybe... finally freed.

I was alone.

Truly alone.

Not alone like in the middle of an empty field or a deserted corridor.

Alone like when nothing, neither inside nor outside, responds.

Alone... with that light.

That suspended, radiant, impassive presence, that said nothing, promised nothing, but stayed there — a witness. It didn’t impose its clarity. It didn’t offer warmth. It simply observed.

And with it... I was alone with myself.

Not the former self.

Not the one who doubted, who screamed, who struck or begged.

Not the one who sought meaning, an enemy, a sin to atone for.

No.

I was alone with the new me.

The one who came after.

The one who didn’t yet know if he had been born or had died, but who stood there, upright, in that white light, without shadow, without cry, without face.

And there was nothing else.

And finally...

She stopped.

Without gesture. Without tension.

As if the universe itself, by simple consent, had just placed a full stop on movement. Before her... there was nothing.

Nothing visible.

Nothing concrete.

No threshold. No door. No symbol.

But the space, imperceptibly, changed.

Something in the air — in its texture, in its temperature, in its density — vibrated. Not abruptly. Not like a revelation. More like an underground wave, like a warmth rising in the bones without warning. A shift of the invisible.

And with that wave...

A voice.

At first indistinct. Distant. Almost absurd in that white, rootless void.

Very distant.

Very blurry.

As if muffled under layers of time, of forgotten memories, of deep waters.

— Hmm... mmm... sleep now... my little one...

A song.

No, more than a song.

A lullaby.

Ancient.

Trembling.

Perhaps even out of tune.

But more real than everything that had come before me.

My throat tightened brutally, as if breath refused to come out, as if my vocal cords, torn by too many past screams, decided despite me to strangle what was rising.

— WHY?!

The scream came out nonetheless.

Raw.

Naked.

Almost childlike in its despair.

I had killed my tenderness. I had watched it die under my fists, under my teeth, under my choices. I had crushed that part of me — deliberately, methodically. I wasn’t supposed to feel this anymore. Not supposed to tremble at the touch of a lullaby. Not supposed to be moved by the gentle voice of a past I had renounced.

Why... did this memory still tear me apart?

Why, instead of fading, did it return with that painful softness, that warmth that burned more than cold?

I wanted to step back.

Move away.

Extinguish that song, that whisper, that mirage.

But my back hit something.

A dull thud.

Dry.

Invisible.

A wall.

Not made of matter. Not made of light.

A threshold.

Unmarked. Undrawn.

But there.

Present.

As if space itself refused to let me retreat.

I was beginning to understand.

More and more.

This new world, this silent whiteness, this shadowless light... it wasn’t a refuge, nor a punishment, nor even a space between things.

It was a threshold.

An aftermath place.

And from now on, I had to go through.

Had to face.

Not because I was being forced. Not because a divine hand or a fate pushed me.

But because I could no longer flee.

Because this place — in its crushing perfection, in its implacable calm — denied me all escape. It offered me neither flight, nor forgetting, nor retreat. Only a bare demand: to face. To dive into what I had tried to bury, to reject, to crush into silence.

I now had to walk straight toward what I had fled all my life.

And I knew it.

I could no longer do otherwise.

Then...

The voice resumed.

Not clear.

Not shaped like a sentence. Not anchored in the present.

It vibrated.

It resonated in a place I thought dead — deeper than thought, older than memory. It vibrated... in my heart. Or in what remained of it.

— You remember, it said.

A simple sentence. But it carried a weight I didn’t know how to bear.

— It was the first.

I trembled.

Not from cold. Not from fear.

From refusal.

— NO!

A torn scream. A protest. A final defense thrown across the abyss.

But the voice continued, unhurried, unhindered.

— You didn’t yet understand the words...

— But you felt... that she sang only for you.

And then, something gave way.

I pressed my hands against my ears. Hard. Enough to hurt myself. Enough to try to protect myself. Like a child. Like an animal.

But the lullaby continued.

It wasn’t targeting my hearing.

It passed through.

It slipped between bones, between memories, between nerves. It went deeper. Further. To where hands never go anymore.

It aimed for my belly.

My core.

The center I had forgotten. The one I had let die to become what I had become. That warm, fragile, beating point that no mask can cover.

It aimed for that bond.

That mute bond. Organic. Irreducible.

The one that linked me to her.

— She sang even when you slept, murmured the voice.

Not to be heard.

Not to be thanked.

She sang because she didn’t know how to do otherwise. Because your breathing, even unconscious, was enough to give her the strength to keep going.

— She sang even when she was being beaten...

A silence slid in.

Then the voice resumed, lower, more trembling, but unwavering:

— ... because she loved you.

And then, I fell.

Not like one stumbles.

I fell like one lets go.

To my knees.

Slowly.

Breath sliced through the chest, as if it no longer had the right to continue. My heart beat too slowly, as if even it no longer dared to stay alive. And the void... that void so full, too full, charged with a soft and white pain, threatened to overflow me.

I closed my eyes.

Desperately.

But the light passed under my eyelids.

It didn’t ask permission. It didn’t knock. It entered. Gently. It seeped through the cracks. Through the weaknesses. Through the memories that couldn’t be erased.

And it illuminated me.

From the inside.

Not like grace.

Not like a miracle.

But like a truth one can no longer ignore.