Anthesis of Sadness
Chapter 185: Mom

Chapter 185: Mom

I was fleeing, not in that animal jolt instinct demands when death approaches, nor in that lucid tension still searching for an exit deep in the maze, but in a deeper movement, perhaps more cowardly, surely more human — a dull, visceral drive, incapable of stating a goal, a cause, a strategy; I was fleeing so I wouldn’t hear anymore, so I wouldn’t feel anymore, so I wouldn’t be that body loaded with images, with faces, with screams I no longer wanted to carry; I was fleeing, not to save myself, not even to understand what I had become, but simply to cover the collapse under a veil of movement, to mask the shipwreck with an absurd run, so that if not redemption, there would at least be forgetting.

The contact of the Firstborn still burned on my skin, like an invisible but persistent mark, a thermal memory etched into my pores.

But that wasn’t where the pain took root — it was underneath, deeper, dirtier, in a place I could neither name nor reach, a dark zone of myself I thought forgotten and which, nonetheless, still pulsed, reopened, flayed raw by his mere presence.

It hurt with an old, familiar, shameful pain — not a sharp wound, not a scream, but a slow corrosion, a mute, persistent bite, as if something inside me remembered too well what it never wanted to feel again, and that memory refused to die.

I jumped from one islet to the next without looking, without measuring the space or the void between the forms, like you cross a dream in free fall, without taking the time to think about what each step implies.

I wasn’t thinking anymore — or rather, I refused to, as if the slightest thought might crack the little silence I still had left inside.

And I didn’t feel anything anymore either, not the ground beneath my feet, nor the air on my skin, not even the pain still screaming somewhere — I had pushed everything away, drowned in an absurd, automatic, almost animal movement, just to stop existing altogether.

The world was becoming blurry, not like when you lose grip in a dream, but in a more insidious, more intimate way, as if everything around me — the shapes, the lines, the perspectives — was gently melting under my steps, dissolving into a shifting, trembling matter unable to stand upright.

It was a world turned liquid, unstable, porous, and the more I ran, the more the outlines receded, dissolved, as if reality itself, weary, refused me, refused to hold me, refused to keep playing this cruel game of pretending one belongs somewhere.

I finally reached a broader space, a sort of plain suspended outside reality, flat, smooth, almost neutral, as if the world had decided here to sculpt nothing anymore.

A strange light reigned there — grey, diffuse, with no apparent source, no direction or origin — a light without warmth, without intent, a clarity that illuminated nothing but emptiness, a pale, worn glow, as if only the memory of dawn remained, as if even light, in this place, had given up being alive.

And at the center, isolated in that void with blurred edges, stood a pierced stone — massive, immobile, placed there like a forgotten relic of another age.

It had nothing hostile, nothing ornate either, just that raw, archaic simplicity, carved with a single circular hole, a black void in the matter, a silence sculpted in stone.

It was a Cocons-Tonal — or what was left of one, for everything in it seemed extinguished, devoid of pulse, unplugged from the world.

It didn’t vibrate, it didn’t glow, it no longer sang like those ancient stones once did — it didn’t call, it didn’t even breathe anymore, as if it had never been there to answer.

But I knew.

Without proof, without voice, without written trace.

I felt it in the air, in the way the light itself seemed to step aside around it, in the particular silence that enveloped it — a charged silence, contained, almost respectful.

It was there for that.

To receive.

To absorb.

To welcome a breath.

Not a breath of air. Not a common exhale.

But the kind of breath you hold for far too long, the kind of exhalation you suppress for years, without realizing it, and that ends up burning your throat from being too long unspoken.

It was there for that.

So that one could finally breathe out.

So that one could let go.

So that one could yield.

So that one could collapse, without shame.

I approached, slowly, like you enter a memory you never wanted to awaken, each step weighted with a dull gravity, an old weight that no muscle could lighten.

My heart was beating too fast, not with excitement, not with alarm, just that soft, inner panic that makes your bones tremble without knowing why.

My throat, for its part, had tightened like a suture pulled too tight, ready to snap at the slightest word.

And my legs, heavy, rooted, seemed to sink deeper with each stride, not into the ground, but into the very matter of my body, as if walking toward that stone meant digging into something I had spent my life burying.

I fell to my knees, without even feeling the exact moment my legs gave out, as if the body, itself, had understood before me that it was time to bend.

My hands trembled — not from fear, not from cold, but from that subterranean exhaustion we never name, the one that accumulates over unspoken things, withheld reactions, unread pages.

My lips found the opening, that mute circle at the heart of the stone, and then I exhaled — not loudly, no, not for long either, but with that raw sincerity that seeks neither effect nor forgiveness, just an outlet, just a passage.

I breathed out what was left in me, what I could no longer hold back, that scattered excess, that matter piled up across the unspoken Chapters, the silences kept too high in the throat, the refusals stacked like stones on the chest.

I exhaled like you let go of something old, not to free yourself, but because you can’t carry it anymore.

And... nothing.

No vibration in return, no distant echo brushing my eardrums, not even a faint pulse in the stone, as if it had at least heard me.

No light, no shiver, no sign that this breath, this fragment of soul I had let slip from me, had found its place, had touched anything but emptiness.

It was lost. Dissolved. Swallowed.

Like me.

And in that silent space with no answer, no edge, no explicit refusal but saturated with absence, I felt, for the first time, that maybe... there would be no return.

Maybe what I had given wasn’t enough.

Or it was already too late to be heard.

I stayed there, unable to move, my lips still pressed against the cold stone, frozen in an absurd position, almost grotesque, as if the slightest movement might break what remained of silence, or pride, or breath.

I wasn’t really breathing anymore, or so faintly that even the air seemed hesitant to enter, to exit, as if my body had chosen to suspend its right to live, waiting for something to respond, waiting for a trace to come back to me.

And then, without warning, without conscious decision, without foreword, a scream crossed through me — dry, scraped, twisted, like ripped out from a place I no longer even knew still held voice.

This scream wanted no words, it refused forms, it was raw, animal, a call thrown into the void to make sure the void exists...

But despite itself, a word clung to it, like a splinter you can’t hold back anymore, a word from a past too alive, too close, too charged to disappear — a single word, expelled despite myself, in a broken breath:

— Cassandre...

But I understood — too late, as always, as in all those moments when the heart speaks before the mind, when truth surfaces in a slip stronger than oneself.

It wasn’t her I was calling, not really, not from the depths where that word had risen.

It wasn’t her name my lips had betrayed, but another, older, more buried, a name I thought lost in the sediment of forgetting.

And that’s when I felt it: my voice was no longer mine, or rather it wasn’t quite anymore — it had changed in the scream, had broken, high-pitched, fragile, surprisingly thin, almost foreign, as if filtered through a forgotten memory of my own throat.

It was younger, more bare, almost transparent, a child’s whisper escaped from an adult’s body, slipped into the space without warning.

And what had passed my lips, what had slipped out of me without me being able to stop it, wasn’t a complaint, nor a call, nor a vow —

It was a word, a single one, a tiny, impossible word, carrying a softness too dangerous to be named:

— Mom...?

And it stayed there, suspended in the grey air, without echo, without response, frozen like a forbidden fragment, like a confession uttered too late in a world that no longer listened.

The world didn’t vibrate — not a ripple in the air, not a wave on the stone, not even that faint resonance you hope for when you pronounce something that ancient.

It remained mute, closed, indifferent, as if it hadn’t heard, or as if it had decided not to respond...

But inside me, something gave in, something vibrated, yes, intensely, irreversibly, as if that single word — that forgotten child’s whisper — had cracked the armor, awakened fibers long dormant.

It was my whole being trembling, not from fear, not even from pain, but from that inner quake a memory too true, too bare, too loaded can trigger.

Everything I was vibrated — everything I had been before silence settled in, before shame covered it up, before I decided, somewhere, to no longer be that: a son, a small one, a fragile.

Everything I had forgotten to be... was slowly rising again, with painful modesty, with unbearable tenderness.

I fell forward, without strength, without calculation, simply because I could no longer remain upright, because something in me had just snapped — a thread, a dam, a memory — and the body, despite everything it had held, no longer knew how to hide it.

My forehead struck the stone in a gesture almost tender, almost deliberate, as if I had needed to touch, to anchor myself, to collapse somewhere the world wouldn’t see me.

My arms were empty — not just devoid of strength, but emptied of function, of intent, of identity.

My thoughts were burning, curling onto themselves in incandescent chaos, impossible to articulate.

And my heart... my heart hadn’t exploded; it had simply let itself fall, abandoned like a child fallen asleep too close to the cold, still beating, but no longer fighting.

And in that collapse, that fall inward, the voice — that inner voice that haunted me, hunted me, sometimes broke me — said nothing this time.

It remained there, present, tangible in the silence... but mute, because it didn’t need to speak, because it knew the moment had spoken for it, that everything had been said in that breath, in that name, in that lost word,

And that now... there was nothing left but to feel.