Anthesis of Sadness
Chapter 220: The Wall of the Unspoken

Chapter 220: The Wall of the Unspoken

I had crossed the bridge — or what passed for a bridge — and already, behind me, it had vanished, not like an object that disappears, but like a memory the world refuses to keep. It didn’t collapse. It didn’t fold. It simply decomposed, slowly, in a viscous silence, as if nothing had ever been there, as if the crossing itself had existed only for me, for a single passage, before being returned to the organic void from which it had emerged.

A memory that didn’t want to stay. Or perhaps a sign that this world only accepted motion — not traces.

As for the world... it thickened again, gently, imperceptibly at first, then with a more marked slowness, almost viscous, as if space itself was growing heavier around me. The ground became dense again, almost pulpy under my feet, filled with a soft and vibrant substance, neither stone nor flesh, something between moss and membrane, which seemed to absorb each of my steps with clammy complacency. The walls too drew closer, not like a trap, not with that direct hostility one immediately recognizes, but with a form of imposed intimacy, suffocating, like a body too close you hadn’t chosen. And with each step, I slipped further into a narrowing corridor, more constricted, more organic with every meter, as if I were sinking into a vegetal throat, warm and foreign, passing through a living architecture that hadn’t been designed for me, yet still swallowed me all the same.

And yet, something in it recognized me. An acceptance without tenderness, without anger. As if I were expected, not desired but tolerated, like a parasite the host body decides not to reject.

In front of me, I saw her.

A surface. Smooth. Convex. Almost liquid in the way it reflected light without truly returning it — as if it absorbed it, smothered it, digested it slowly in its curves. It emerged in the center of the corridor, rising from a tangle of fibers and vegetal flesh, and yet... it was not part of it. It resembled nothing else here. It stood out, yes, with an almost brutal obviousness, like an anomaly the world itself had failed to hide. It was there, blatant, set in the heart of the organic like an artificial certainty, a soft and mute excrescence that didn’t even try to blend into the living — and that was precisely what made it unsettling.

It didn’t try to exist. It was simply there. Unmovable. Unexplainable. Like a verdict laid down without justification.

It was a wall, yes — but not a neutral wall, not a simple transitional surface.

It was a reflection.

Not of me, exactly. Not of who I was at that precise moment. But of who I had been upon entering here. Of what I had carried the moment I crossed the threshold of the floor. The silhouette was there, frozen, static, embedded in the smooth surface like a memory imprinted on a sensitive material, not a mirror, not a returned illusion, but a reproduction — a displaced duplicate, etched into a living substance, too dense to be glass, too fluid to be metal.

It looked like me. Yes. But with a slight delay. A subtle distortion.It still bore my entry fears, those nervous tensions I had tried to forget. It kept my hesitations, my initial doubts, those that had perhaps marked my flesh without my knowing. And it remained there, impassive, fixed in a time that was no longer mine. It didn’t move, but it existed. That was the most disturbing part: it truly existed.

I approached, slowly, almost despite myself, drawn by that frozen silhouette the way one is drawn to a mistake of oneself that one cannot help but look at. And then... she opened her mouth.

No sound.

But the lips, yes — the lips moved.

Slowly. With an almost painful precision. As if each movement was a silent repetition of something essential. They formed words I could not hear, sounds that perhaps existed only for her, or that the wall itself absorbed before they were born. There was no cry. No complaint. Just that shift, that empty beat, between a silent language and my own memory, unable to grasp what she was trying to tell me.

But that beat, that precise void... I knew it. It had existed in me. Just before certain phrases. Just after certain silences.

What her lips said... I recognized it immediately.Not like one recognizes a voice from the past, nor like recalling a too-fresh thought. No. It was deeper. More intimate. It was what I still refused to say to myself. Those phrases didn’t come from yesterday or today — they came from an in-between, a silent place hidden within me, a grey zone where I had pushed everything I hadn’t been able to face. They were made of stray fragments of my own breath, stifled confessions cut short, repressed judgments before they even took shape, unfinished words stopped mid-way — fragments held in my throat on the previous floors, or perhaps long before, at thresholds I had never known how to name. And now... they came back through her. Through that mute mouth offering them to me without pronouncing them.

She didn’t speak. No sound came from her mouth. But her lips, yes, continued to move slowly, forming words I couldn’t hear but could nonetheless understand — or sense, with that strange lucidity one can’t explain, as if my body itself recognized what it read without passing through thought. It wasn’t a voice. It was an intention. A presence. Something in the rhythm of the gestures, in the way each silent syllable formed on that other version of me, transmitted the message directly. And what she said, I felt it. Viscerally.

— You don’t want to be seen...

— You refuse to exist in another’s gaze...

— You hate the idea that someone could love you despite what you carry...

These phrases weren’t spoken. But they still resonated, where the things we thought we had forgotten resonate. They didn’t come from her. They came from me.

It wasn’t her whispering them. It was me, once, in another silence, one I hadn’t known how to hear.

I stepped back, an uncertain step, moved less by fear than by that deep reflex of rupture, that need to create distance in the face of something I recognized too well. And she stepped back too. Without delay. Without hesitation. Perfectly synchronized. Like a perfect double, not copied from my movements, but rooted in their very intention, as if she wasn’t imitating me — no — but acting at the exact same moment, because she was made of the same impulse, the same retreat. It wasn’t a copy. It was an embodied echo.

I took a sidestep, almost to defy her, to break the axis, shatter the mirror — and so did she. Exactly at the same instant. Without the slightest delay. As if she wasn’t following me, but already knew. As if she wasn’t imitating anything, but responding to something internal, buried, invisible — a twin movement inscribed in the same flesh.

I tried to flee to the left — but the wall, instantly, became smooth, uniform, as if it understood, as if the world itself refused that direction, cancelling the idea of passage before it could take form. So I turned to the right, ready to force the momentum, but she... she followed. Without sound. Without surprise. Without the slightest lag. As an inevitability. As a consciousness resting on my back, determined never to leave me, no matter which direction I pretended to choose.

She was me.

Not my image. Not a frozen copy of my body nor an imitation of my gestures. No. She was the inside. The reverse. What I was still trying to bury beneath the silence, beneath the control, beneath that mute restraint that had accompanied me since the early floors. She was made of what I repressed. And the more I kept silent, the more I hid behind that impassive facade I thought protective, the more she, slowly, quietly, spoke in my place. Not with words. But with her simple presence. With her lips moving soundlessly. With her synchronized gestures. With that gaze without eyes that knew me better than I did. And it was unbearable. Unbearable because she didn’t destroy me. She revealed. And that revelation — soft, slow, intimate — burned more than any attack ever could.

I struck the wall, breathless, nerves frayed, not even knowing whether I wanted to shake it or prove to myself that I was still there. And she, opposite, struck too. At the exact same moment. Same angle. Same force. As if my rage flowed through her veins. As if she had been made to reflect it, contain it, extend it. I screamed within, a soundless cry, a rage held in for far too long, a dull tear clawing at my chest — but she, she whispered aloud. Her lips moved slowly, almost tenderly, as if she were naming a truth I had always refused to hear. Words I had never dared to speak aloud. Sentences that had waited within me, lurking for years, and now came out... through her.

In that confrontation... I felt a fault line.

Not in her. No.

In me.

A fine but deep fracture, like a forgotten crack resurfacing without noise. Because what she imposed on me, that face-to-face without screams, without blows, without apparent violence... it wasn’t a punishment. Nothing in her judged. Nothing punished. It was a restitution. A placing back in my hands of what I had placed too far away, too soon. She was giving back what I had fled, what I had silenced, what I had cast aside like a burden too hot to carry. She wasn’t breaking me. She was stitching me back to what I was.

What she was mending... wasn’t an identity. It was a wound.

It was a mirror, yes — but not one that returns an image.

A mirror of the unspoken.

A body made of my refusals.

A wall woven from my silences, patiently, layer after layer, over years, through floors, through fears, until it formed that smooth and mute surface now facing me. She wasn’t there to stop me. She was there to show me. And if I wanted to continue... if I truly wanted to move forward, to cross that blurred threshold, to slip further into this world that now demanded more than just my presence... I would have to go through it. That wall. That body. That memory. I would have to pass through what I had fled.

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