Anthesis of Sadness
Chapter 216: When the Breath Becomes Threshold

Chapter 216: When the Breath Becomes Threshold

It wasn’t a room. Not a constructed place, not a space defined by walls or volumes, but something more blurred, more intimate, more alive. A kind of filter. A porous passage. An organ. An airlock. A test.

Not an imposed test, not a visible trial, but a deep sensation, almost biological, as if my being was being sifted through something.

I saw nothing, and yet... I felt it that way. With that vague certainty, inscribed in my breath, in my bones, in my skin. As if this place, without real form, weighed on me with the precision of a silent diagnosis.

I stood there for a few seconds, motionless before the wall, not knowing if I should touch it, pass through it, or simply wait.

Time didn’t really exist anymore — only this floating within me mattered, this charged hesitation, almost sacred, as if every gesture could trigger something irreversible. Then, slowly, I decided to bring my hand closer, with that strange caution we reserve for living beings, not for things.

I breathed. Hard. Too hard. A breath that wasn’t meant for the world, but that escaped me nonetheless, too tense, too human.

And then... it quivered.

The wall, at first supple, seemed to tense up. It stiffened all at once, hardened under the effect of my poorly contained presence, and became opaque. As if my breath alone had been enough to strike it, to disturb it, to remind it that I still existed with too much noise.

I was now certain that all this was linked — not to my visible gestures, nor even to my physical presence, but to what I carried inside, to what vibrated too strongly beneath the surface of my skin.

It was directly connected to my thoughts, my hesitations, my poorly digested doubts, that nameless dull anxiety that inhabited me, that creeping paranoia that insinuates itself when one no longer knows whether the world embraces us or watches us.

This place didn’t react to what I did, but to what I was, in my deepest tensions, in my tiniest cracks, in that way I had of breathing badly without even realizing it.

So I sat down on the ground. Gently. As one sinks into something living, fragile, conscious.

I no longer sought to cross, nor to understand. I had no plan, no intention. Just this instinctive need to anchor myself, to lay down my body, to let the tension dissolve into matter.

So I began to breathe. Slowly. Unhurriedly. Little by little, I widened the space between my thoughts. I didn’t fight them. I let them flow, float, then... I pulled them downward.

With the patience of a slow gesture.

I weighed them down until they stopped vibrating. Until they stopped screaming. Until, finally, they made no more noise within me.

I had emptied myself of all immediate goals, of all mental direction, of everything that grew in me with too much force, too much impatience, too much need to understand. I no longer expected anything. I no longer tried to enter. I no longer tried to be perceived.

I simply let myself... be there. Present without insisting. Silent without struggle. Just a breath placed in the space, a form that finally accepted not to force anything.

And little by little... the wall changed.

It softened. Not like a material that gives way, but like a skin that consents. It did not open. It did not reveal a threshold. It did not welcome.

It vanished.

Discreetly. Completely. As if it had never been there. As if the world, for the first time, no longer separated me from it.

So I got up. Slowly. Without haste, without a sharp gesture, like one emerging from a dream, still inhabited by calm, by blur, by slowness.

My mind was clearer than before I sat down, washed of its initial turbulence, emptied of that agitation that had followed me since entering this nameless world.

The thoughts were still there, of course — they never really disappear — but they had softened, less sharp, less noisy, as if they too had accepted to breathe at the rhythm of the place.

And I crossed the threshold.

Not as a conqueror. Not as a guest. But as a presence granted to the world. A humble, fluid, discreet presence, a living form that no longer sought to impose itself, but that had gently adjusted, adapted, absorbed by what surrounded it.

And the world, for the first time... let me through.

On the other side, the silence was still there. Total. Absolute. Still as a substance. But I no longer perceived it as a punishment. It no longer assaulted me, no longer crushed me.

By wandering in it, by breathing in its hollows, by surviving without auditory support, I had gotten used to it — not out of resignation, but through transformation. Perhaps it was due to my advanced statistics. Perhaps to this world, to this crossing, to everything it had shifted in me.

I didn’t really know. But something had changed.

I had grown.

Not in my body. Not in my skills. But elsewhere. Inside. In the space I never looked at. And I could feel it. Truly. I was a little vaster than before. A little more stable.

And yet... I knew it was only the beginning.

So now, I no longer saw silence as a barrier, nor as an enemy. I saw it as a condition.

A medium to inhabit.

A language to learn.

I knew it instinctively, without reasoning, without proof: here, in this suspended world, the voice, the sound, the words... had never needed to be heard.

They weren’t made to cross the air, nor to strike an ear, nor even to produce a vibration.

They existed differently, elsewhere, like a raw intention, like a mental breath that doesn’t seek to resonate, but to be perceived from within, to be felt more than heard, absorbed rather than received.

And that was perhaps the true language of this place.

A language without sound.

But not without presence.

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