Anthesis of Sadness
Chapter 212: The Shroud of Silence

Chapter 212: The Shroud of Silence

The ground beneath my feet... was no longer really ground.

It held neither familiar consistency nor reassuring weight. It was neither stone, nor earth, nor metal. It was a textured absence.

Something between void and matter.

Each step met with a resistance, light, almost dreamy, as if I were walking on the memory of a ground, on a collective memory of what walking means. There was a vague density, like condensed breath, a fabric of thick and silent air.

No friction. No sound. No trace.

But with every step, I felt that I was being carried. Not supported. Just... tolerated.

As if this ground did not impose itself, but allowed me. That sensation alone... was enough to make me question my actual weight.

It was a membrane.

Nervous. Pulsating.

Not a ground. An organism. A skin stretched between two dimensions, quivering under my steps, as if each of them triggered a wave, a response, a breath.

It reacted.

To pressure. To rhythm. To the slightest hesitation.

As if it were listening to me walk.

Not in a metaphorical sense. Truly. Intimately.

It listened to my steps the way one listens to a heartbeat. It absorbed my footing without erasing it. It seemed to understand what I did not say, to perceive what my body still refused to admit.

In that strange, almost living listening, I felt no threat.

Only an attention. A presence.

As if this world... was aware of me. And it was responding. Without a word.

But it said nothing. And nothing around me said anything either.

The sounds hadn’t just stopped. They had evaporated, absorbed, dissolved into a silence too vast to be natural. A total silence, without edge, without direction, without depth. The rain, the wind, the rustlings of the world... all had disappeared. Not muffled, not suspended, but like vaporized, melted into an invisible weave.

Even my breath had ceased to exist in space. I could still feel it, I was still breathing, but there was no sonic trace of it left. Nothing answered. Not even an echo.

There remained only that beating.

Distant. Muffled.

As if it no longer truly belonged to me. As if my heart were beating in another body than mine, or in a shifted version of myself, an erased me, floating, kept alive by a remainder of memory.

In this absolute silence, that isolated beating was enough. It was the only proof that I was still here. And it was all I needed.

Then... I saw her.

My mother.

Once again.

But this time, it wasn’t a hallucination. Nor a vision projected by exhaustion. Nor the blurry silhouette of the statue. Nor the hard or broken voice that haunted my memories.

It was her.

Present. Physically there, without a doubt.

Too real to be a dream. Too sharp to belong to memory. She didn’t vibrate like a mental image. She didn’t carry that blurry strangeness that memories sometimes impose. She stood there, upright, silent, at the edge of this white and soundless world.

She said nothing.

And yet, everything in her spoke. Her clarity. Her grounding. That way she had of standing, without tension or expectation, as if she knew perfectly why she was there.

She wasn’t gentle. She wasn’t threatening.

She was... full. Complete.

And I knew, without a single word, that this presence... was neither an illusion nor a trial. It was a meeting. The last. Or the first.

She held a child against her chest.

His tiny body was nestled against her, peaceful, surrendered in such a deep sleep that he seemed to belong to another world. His breathing was imperceptible, fused with that of the woman holding him, as if the two of them formed but a single breath, slow, silent, continuous.

She... looked at me.

Not long. Not intensely. Just a moment. Enough.

A gaze without pressure, without expectation, without wound. A gaze that said everything without forming anything. That needed no word, no explanation.

And I understood.

I understood that she knew. What I felt. What I fled. What I had carried. I understood that she saw beyond all I had destroyed or refused. And that in spite of all that — or perhaps because of it — she still loved me.

Not with the fragile tenderness one offers to children. But with that kind of ancient love, mute, indisputable, that expects nothing in return and asks for no forgiveness.

She didn’t speak.

She didn’t move.

She didn’t even smile.

But in her simple presence...

everything was said.

Then she turned.

Her back to me.

Without haste, without dramatics, without needless mystery. As if that movement had always been planned. As if her coming had had but one purpose: to look at me, to recognize me, then to leave.

She walked toward the light.

A soft light. White. With no visible source. It emanated from nothing, and yet, it filled everything. It didn’t blind. It didn’t call. It simply existed, like a place beyond.

She did not turn back.

And I knew it wasn’t forgetfulness. Not escape. She wasn’t abandoning me. She just no longer needed to check whether I followed.

Because now, she knew. And so did I.

There was nothing left to prove. Neither between her and me. Nor between me and what I had become.

I... stepped through the threshold.

Without tears. Nothing left to cry. The dams had fallen long before. What remained in me no longer needed to be emptied.

Without questions. They had all been asked, sometimes without words, sometimes in screams, sometimes just in the silence of an evasive gaze. And the answers... I no longer awaited them.

Without expectations. I hoped for nothing from what lay beyond. I sought neither appeasement nor comfort. Only... to continue. To put one foot in front of the other. To breathe again. To be there.

And the silence... engulfed me.

Not like a sea. Not like a cold, wet abyss into which one sinks without return.

But like a shroud.

A stretched cloth, supple, living. Laid over a body to cover it, to contain it, not to erase but to welcome it.

That silence was not an end.

It was a skin.

And beneath it... I was still breathing.

So I moved forward.

One step after another, without momentum, without urgency. As if each gesture, from now on, had its place. As if the simple fact of moving forward was enough.

In a new world.

But not a dazzling one, not burning with renewal or promise. A suspended world.

Neither above, nor below. Neither before, nor after.

A space between heartbeats. Between memories and what will come.

A world without gravity, but not without weight. A world that didn’t impose itself, that didn’t shout its newness — a world that let itself be discovered, slowly, at the rhythm of my steps.

And I, I was no longer in a hurry. I was no longer afraid. I was not ready. But I was there.

And I walked on.