Anthesis of Sadness
Chapter 221: The Remaining Sentence

Chapter 221: The Remaining Sentence

I stayed facing her.

Or rather: facing myself.

Because that form frozen in the wall — that reflection without reflection, that silhouette embedded in a matter too alive to be inert, too mute to be empty — kept mimicking what I was, but with a cruel shift.

A shift that didn’t say: "you are late." But: "you are fleeing."

She didn’t repeat my gestures. No. She didn’t imitate what I was doing. She replayed what I was holding back. Every silenced hesitation, every restrained emotion, every interrupted breath — she embodied them. She carried them in my place. She made them visible.

That... tore me apart. Because she showed what I refused to admit: that my body was lying, but she, she was telling the truth.

So I tried.

Not to speak — I already knew the words would slip without reaching, that they would only brush the surface without ever cracking what needed to be.

I didn’t try to move either, nor to flee, nor even to understand.

I tried... to think differently.

Not in the sense of changing my mind, or inventing a way out. But in the sense of inhabiting the inside differently. Of moving within myself. Of stopping fighting against what was surfacing, and trying — just trying — to no longer censor, no longer sort, no longer classify. To let rise what I was used to swallowing. To accept that certain thoughts, certain images, certain sensations could exist without having to be corrected or pushed away. I tried to release the inner jaw. To lower the weapons of judgment. Just a little.

In that suspension, in that breath torn from control, I understood what I hadn’t known how to do for a long time: welcome a sensation without dissecting it.

And in that effort, tiny but burning, I realized how foreign it had become to me... simply to be with myself.

The wall didn’t move.

It didn’t vibrate, didn’t deform, didn’t push me away either.It was waiting.

Motionless. Impassive. Almost absent.

Not a sound filtered through. Not an emotion emanated from it. It emitted nothing. But something, in its mute density, in that compact silence that seemed to envelop me from the inside, carried a demand. Not a pain. Not a memory. A sentence.A single one.

I understood it suddenly — not as an idea, but as a brutal truth, dropped into my stomach like a stone in stagnant water. That wall didn’t want me to cross it by force. It was waiting for me to speak. At last.

She, the wall-figure, that living imprint frozen on the surface, kept forming words. Always the same. Always in the same order. Tirelessly. Like a silent mechanism rooted in my memory. As if she were reciting something I had never known how to hear but that I nonetheless recognized. A sentence written elsewhere. In me, perhaps. Or in the very fabric of the floor. And a shiver ran through me — slow, vertical, deep, not born from fear but from the sudden, painful recognition of a truth I hadn’t yet accepted... but which was already there, repeated aloud by that mouth that had never needed sound.

A truth that didn’t scream. It whispered endlessly, until I was naked enough to hear.

I recognized them.

Those words she was tirelessly forming, I had already said them. One day. I no longer knew when, or to whom, or even in which body I was at that moment. But they had come out of me. They had existed in my mouth. Spoken without attention, without weight, without awareness. Let loose like one says what one believes to be true to escape what truly is. I had said them, yes — but without listening to what I was saying. And now... they were coming back to me, carved on that living wall, repeated without hatred, without irony, just there, present, insistent, as if to force me to hear what I myself had refused to hear when it was still possible.

It was old.

Very old.

Perhaps in childhood, at a blurry, misty moment, never fully named. Perhaps in the chasm, that contourless place where thoughts retract. Perhaps even here, earlier, without my realizing it, between two floors, between two silences, between two fears. I no longer knew. But I had said them. Those words. And they had stayed. Invisible but alive. They had clung to me like supple, creeping thorns, which I refused to feel but which had continued to grow in my folds, quietly, stubbornly, until they finally found the right wall to bloom again. Now.

And now...

I had to say them again.

But not like before.

Not like a polite excuse whispered to soothe the moment. Not like a hollow reflex, inherited from survival habits. Not like a defense thrown on too quickly to mask the crack. No. This time, I had to say them differently.

I had to pronounce them with all the weight they contained. Their original density. Their rough truth.

Everything I had never dared to carry. Everything I had sidestepped, minimized, covered with silence or diverted gestures. I had to give them back their mass. Their grounding. Their intact emotional charge.

Say them, fully. And let them pass through me. At last.

Not so they could deliver me. But so that, in their passing, they would leave me whole.

So I took a breath. Slow. Trembling. As if my lungs hesitated to welcome that breath, as if even the air knew it would carry something other than a simple word.

And I murmured, within — not aloud, not yet, but just loud enough for the inner world to hear:

— I don’t care. It doesn’t matter.

Three words. Nothing more.

And yet... two refusals. A retreat. A cowardice disguised as detachment. A clumsy attempt to defuse what was burning without extinguishing it. A sentence I had said a hundred times without hearing it, and which, here, weighed like a gentle condemnation.

Because I now knew what it contained: the abandonment before the pain. The denial before the fear. And this time... it would not pass.

I had once thrown them like stones.

Without thinking. Without weighing them. Just to strike, to cut short, to silence what threatened to emerge.

I had thrown them on myself, first — to silence myself faster, to make myself shut up. Not to cry. Not to feel. Then on others too, not always intentionally, but with the same inner mechanism: that of rejection, instinctive defense, that way I had learned too early to turn pain into weapon, cracks into projectiles.

And now... I was saying them while hearing them for the first time.

Not with my ears, but with what was left alive under the layers, under the silences, under the defensive folds I had cultivated so much.

I was saying them... and I was receiving them.

That reception... wasn’t gentle. It tore something out. But what it left in me vibrated.

And the form in the wall — the one who had carried my unsaids, who had mimed my tensions, repeated my denials — looked at me. Slowly. Without insistence.

And she smiled.

No mockery in that smile. No irony. Not even a hint of victory.

It was a smile of release. Of peaceful surrender. As if she too, finally, was relieved. As if my confession had freed her just as much as it had freed me, and that she had never wanted anything else but that moment — not to disappear, but to be able to stop waiting.

Then, without a sound, the wall became fluid.

Its surface, once frozen like a mute mirror, began to ripple gently, with the weary slowness of things that have waited too long. It looked like a tired membrane, worn out by time, by reflections, by successive refusals — a living skin that no one had ever dared to cross, not out of fear of the passage, but out of fear of what it would release.

I reached out. And it didn’t push it away. It opened. Or rather: it stopped resisting.

As if it had been made for that precise moment, neither before nor after.

Then I passed through.

Not like one walks through a door, but like one slips through oneself. Like crossing a threshold one had carried inside forever, unknowingly.

And the sentence, it, remained suspended behind me.

Like an unclaimed breath. Like an echo clinging to space, to matter, to silence itself. It didn’t disappear. It didn’t dissolve. It remained there, suspended in the air, in the wall, in that threshold turned memory.

But this time... I knew what it contained. I knew its weight.

Its pain.

Its truth.

And above all — I knew I could no longer pretend not to know.

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