Anthesis of Sadness
Chapter 219: She Weighs Nothing. I Do.

Chapter 219: She Weighs Nothing. I Do.

The passage thinned little by little, retracting beneath my steps like a thread unwinding in reverse, and I suddenly felt the strange sensation that the world, in a discreet yet implacable whim, was deciding to no longer offer me ground, as if moving forward had become a fault, a gesture too many, an insistence that space itself now refused to welcome.

As if, this time, it was the world imposing the stop. Not out of cruelty, but out of saturation. As if it could no longer absorb what I was becoming.

The material changed beneath my steps, becoming finer, more elongated, almost woven — no longer a stable ground, but a succession of living, organic cables, like stretched nerves or exposed veins, knotted between two arches suspended in the void, barely swayed by a breath I could not feel, as if I were walking on a narrow thread stretched between two breaths of the world, between two hesitations of the air itself.

I stopped, without abruptness, without any apparent reason, as if something in me — older than will, more instinctive than fear — had placed a weight in my heels, a silent restraint in my breath, inviting me to suspend movement, to let silence become whole again.

In front of me stretched what could have been called a bridge — but the word rang false, too simple, too human, like an attempt to domesticate the unknown with a familiar term. It was not a path, not a crossing offered. It was a condition. A requirement set by the world itself, stretched like a living equation that my steps would have to solve with no promise of outcome. And perhaps not even the possibility of error. Because here, there was no fall. Only dissolution. The slow loss of a support that had never truly been given.

Each fiber vibrated, almost imperceptibly, with a discreet yet continuous tension, as if something profoundly alive throbbed inside their very texture — not a breath, not an echo, but a kind of diffuse alert, transmitted from one nerve to another through shivers of algae or tendon. It wasn’t the wind, for here the air remained still, thick, saturated with a clammy expectation that nothing came to pierce. That tremor responded to something else. A vaster force. A duller one.

Something invisible, but ancient. A tectonic shift of silence. An inner tide not meant to topple me, but to absorb me.

Each thread — suspended vein, corded fiber, almost animal — seemed to react to a hidden gravity, as if the weight of the world itself, that ancient, millennia-old weight, the one you no longer feel because it is everywhere, was depositing itself drop by drop into each fiber to inform it, to contract it, to warn it that something, somewhere, was about to tip over.

And me... it was on that that I had to move forward — on this vibrating weave, woven of nerves or artificial ligaments, on this suspended network that was neither path nor floor, but something in between, ambiguous, a living interlace too tense to inspire trust, too supple to be ignored, as if I were setting my feet on a sleeping body I had no right to wake.

Each step felt like a caress given too strongly, a breath out of place, an intrusion so soft that it became all the more violent.

Each step became an intrusion. An almost intimate fault. And yet, I had no other choice.

I placed a foot, cautiously, almost reluctantly, and the fiber reacted instantly — it tensed beneath me with a supple, almost animal tension, like a living rope evaluating me. Then, in a second movement, it retracted slightly, not to withdraw, but to adjust, as if it were trying to understand what I was, what I was carrying.

It held me, yes, but I felt it did so only on a fragile, precarious, implicit condition: that I not be too heavy. Not in my body. Not in my thoughts. Because very quickly, I understood — or rather, I sensed it, in the micro-movements of the material beneath my feet, in the trembling of its fibers tensed like tendons beneath a giant’s skin — every thought too dense, every memory too laden, every fear too tight added more weight. And that weight, it felt. It measured. It judged.

It vibrated, yes, but with an inner vibration, contained, almost nervous, like a muscle under too much strain. It didn’t sing, didn’t really rustle — it creaked, gently, not with sound but with resistance, as if its very texture refused what it supported, as if it struggled to welcome what I represented.

And if, by reflex, I tensed — if my breath blocked, if an involuntary fear crossed the threshold of my nape — then it twisted, subtly, violently, like a beast under the skin, a living nerve expressing its refusal without a cry, but with the implicit promise that nothing would hold if I continued that way.

I had to let go. Slowly. Completely. Not of any visible weight, but of everything I carried without seeing it — the name, first, that old name grown too heavy for a single syllable; then the past, its broken edges, its remnants clinging to my bones like scraps no one wanted to tear away for me; and the screams too, especially those, the screams I could no longer utter, trapped somewhere between my clenched teeth and the soft hollows of my chest, smothered for far too long.

That deformed me. That made me this unbalanced body, too full, too compressed, incapable of expelling what wanted to come out without words.

I had to let go of everything. I had to reduce myself to the essential. To balance. To become only that: a breath. A step. Another breath. Another step. As if the universe only agreed to carry me on the condition that I ceased to be someone, to become only a fragile rhythm, a bare pulse, offered to the thread.

And behind me... she still followed. Silent, steady, unchanged. The thing detached from the wall, that nameless excrescence, without apparent function, but stubbornly present, floated a few steps away, as if suspended to a logic that eluded me. She didn’t lag. She didn’t slow down. She didn’t draw any closer. She persisted, simply, in that precise distance, as if the invisible link between us — born of silence, nourished by emptiness — was enough to guide her.

And even without sound, even without contact, I felt her presence weigh, not on my nape, but somewhere deeper, in that murky zone where instinct senses what reason dares not look at.

She didn’t touch the fibers. Not really. She didn’t make them vibrate like I did, didn’t tense them, didn’t make them creak beneath her passage. She slid between them, like a conscious mist, an absence shaped into the form of a presence, and each separation of thread seemed to welcome her without resistance, without distrust, as if the world itself recognized her.

As if she weighed nothing. Or rather: as if she carried nothing. No name. No story. No conflict.

She had no memory, no weight. She had no origin to defend, no story to justify. And that absence, that quiet void, weighed heavier than any armor.

And I wasn’t jealous — no, not quite — but I was increasingly sure, in that slow suspended walk, that her nature was not foreign to mine. That she was made, not of what I had said, nor even of what I had fled... but of what I had known to keep silent.

That silence. The one no one had asked for, but that I had offered anyway, by instinct or by shame. She was its residue. The condensed echo.

But I... I still carried. Everything I hadn’t yet managed to set down. Everything I hadn’t been able to abandon along the way: the shapeless remains of the past, the names stifled in my throat, the invisible weights lodged in the hollow of my gestures. They were there, clinging to me like mental suction cups, memories folded beneath the skin, and I dragged them without sound, without complaint, but not without effect.

So I kept going. Without defiance, without heroism. Just like that. A breath. A step. And a forgetting.

Or rather: an attempt at forgetting. As if each inhalation allowed me to release a fragment, to relegate a name to the edge of oblivion without quite letting it go.

And the fiber... held. It bent, yes, it wavered under my mixed weight, but it held.

Because I was starting to give in. Me too.

Not because it accepted me. But because I was no longer quite there. A part of me had stopped walking.

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