Anthesis of Sadness
Chapter 223: The Hollow Beneath the Ribs

Chapter 223: The Hollow Beneath the Ribs

I woke up.

Not with a jolt.

Not with a start.

But like one slowly rising from a drowning, helped by a silence too dense, too stuck to the eyelids to be truly left behind. It wasn’t a return — not yet. More like a transition. A slow, blurry push from one world to another, with that grey blur between the two sticking to the skin like an old fever. My body wasn’t following. Or if it was, it did so with that strange delay one feels after a fall, when the limbs seem to respond with a different rhythm, softer, more distant, as if they still doubted whether they truly had to start living again.

Even the air seemed too thick. Too warm. Too alive. As if every particle vibrated with a memory I didn’t have. And yet, it was there, around me, insistent, almost heavy, with that particular weight of places that examine you before letting you stay. I didn’t move right away. My breath, however, searched for a rhythm, groped, held back by I-didn’t-know-what fear still lurking under the ribs. Not a precise fear. Not an identifiable threat. But that murky premonition you sometimes get when you wake up, for no reason, when the world seems too calm, too suspended, too ready to close in on you if you dare move.

Deep inside me... something was already stirring. A formless thought. A sensation older than me, coming from a place where memories have no face yet. As if another version of myself had woken up before me, and was waiting, sitting in the shadows, patient, with that look one gives a lost brother.

I gently lifted my head. Not like someone deciding to move, but like someone being slowly pulled, by a voiceless call from below. A mute tension in the neck, in the upper back, as if something wanted to straighten me up, make me see, tear me away from stillness. My muscles barely trembled. Not from fatigue, but from hesitation. As if they too sensed that movement would change everything.

There was no one.

But I knew immediately that something had remained.

Not a presence. Not really. No breath, no warmth, none of those signs you feel when a body brushes past you or still watches. It was fainter. More diffuse. Deeper. An impression lodged just beneath the skin, precisely where sensory memories are born, those that don’t think, but react.

A trace.

Not a visible trace. Not a clear sign, not a mark left to be read. Rather... an imprint in the world itself. A few steps from me, where the light fell at an angle, I saw that hollow — discreet, almost shy, but impossible to ignore. A subsidence in the material. A soft depression on the supple surface of the ground, as if the texture had yielded, for a moment, to something denser, more alive, more real than anything this place could contain.

It wasn’t a mere crush. It wasn’t a clear shape. More like an old caress of weight. An imprint left with gentleness, but which nothing had wanted to erase. The matter still seemed to hold it in memory, like a skin too tender retaining the imprint of a loved or feared hand. Oblong. Supple. Irregular. It hesitated between vegetal and human, between sprout and silhouette, between something lying down, buried, perhaps returned.

It wasn’t there when I lay down. I was sure of it. As sure as one can be when it’s not memory speaking, but the body. My back, my gaze, even the perception of the ground in that spot... nothing had vibrated like this before. It wasn’t that I remembered its absence. It’s that I now felt it had imposed itself.

Not settled.

But appeared. Held. Prolonged.

Something — or someone — had chosen not to erase its form.

And yet... I had heard nothing.No vibration in the air. No sliding over the material. No displaced breath.Felt nothing either — no temperature shift, no alerting shiver, no faint contraction along the spine that sometimes comes with the approach of the invisible. And seen nothing. No movement. No fleeting shadow. No blink betrayed by the light.

Just that imprint.

Just that silent proof.

A hollow. An abandonment. A memory without words inscribed in the soft flesh of the world, as if this ground — or what it pretended to be — had learned to preserve the shape of those who passed. Not to expose them. Not to follow them. But to recognize them. To keep them. Like a relic.

I stayed there, seated, my back tensed without wanting it, my muscles clenched around a defensive stillness. I didn’t dare approach. Not yet. It wasn’t fear. Not even caution. It was... something else. An intimate block, instinctive, almost sacred. As if that imprint didn’t belong to me. As if crossing the distance between us would amount to violating something. A secret. A threshold.

It drew me, yes. But like a grave draws empty hands. Like a wound calls for a finger you know you must not lay.

I breathed. Slowly. With that strange feeling that even the air had changed. Thicker. More charged. Almost charged with her. With what she was. Or with what she had left behind.

My body had woken. Yes. The muscles, the nerves, the breath — all had resumed their place, their role, their cadence. But part of me... no. A deeper, more intimate part still wanted to sleep. To stay there, buried in the in-between. That floating threshold between wakefulness and withdrawal, between perception and forgetfulness. Where things don’t split, where pain has no shape yet. A blurred place, suspended, where contact did not wound. Where perhaps, one could be held without being judged. Just exist. Just vibrate, to the rhythm of a world that brushes against you without asking.

I slowly straightened, vertebra by vertebra, as if each segment of my spine needed permission to leave the ground.

And the mark... did not disappear.

It did not retract, did not fade at my approach, did not blur under my gaze. It stayed there, unalterable, docile, patient. As if it feared nothing. As if it was waiting for me. Not with that brutal tension of traps or trials. But with that strange calm of things that know they will be seen. That they must be.

There was something almost tender in that persistence — and that made it all the more disturbing. The ground seemed to have absorbed it, accepted it, not as a wound, but as a just memory. An accord. A trace not denied. A presence erased without being negated.

In that mute waiting, there was a vertigo. Because I no longer knew if it was me she was waiting for. Or something within me I no longer wanted to meet.

But I didn’t move.

Not yet.

My body, though upright, did not yield under fatigue. It wasn’t exhaustion that held me back. It was something else. An older knot. A strange restraint, almost modest. Something in me refused to join her. Not out of rejection — no. Not out of fear of what she might do. But out of a deeper, quieter fear of what she contained. Of what she said without speaking. Of what she risked awakening.

Because it wasn’t a trap. Nothing in her shape, in her texture, spoke of aggression. No line was tense, no curve called for mistrust. And it wasn’t an invitation either. She asked nothing of me. She didn’t even draw me in. She was there. Simply there. Present. Persistent. Indifferent to my hesitations, my expectations, even my awareness.

A remnant.

A leftover.A material echo of a moment I hadn’t known how to keep.Or that I had lost too early.Or perhaps even... that I had never had.

It was that kind of shape. That kind of trace. Not a footprint like the kind left in mud after the rain, but rather what warm bodies leave on cold sheets when they leave too quickly. An immediate memory. Bodily. But already fading. A soft abandonment. A quiet pain. A disappearance that doesn’t apologize.

And I, frozen before it, was not facing a shape.

I was facing what I had let slip by, I felt it.

That trace...

I didn’t dare take it back.

Not because it was forbidden to me, nor because danger hovered around it, but because I knew — vaguely, viscerally — that if I touched it, if I merely brushed it, if I welcomed it like a truth left too long at the edge, then it would never leave me again. It would never become abstract again. It would imprint itself in me. Not as a memory, not as a simple mark... but as a component. A grafted fragment into my living memory. An added layer of myself. Definitive. Irreversible.

And maybe... maybe I wasn’t ready.

Not yet.

There was in that restraint something almost sacred. Like standing at the threshold of a revelation, but sensing, even in the pulp of your fingers, that the knowledge could just as easily save as destroy. Part of me wanted to know. Another, deeper part, whispered that I had to wait. That there would be a price. That some recognitions come only with loss.

So I stayed there.

Not frozen. But held in.

In that strange tension between the desire to absorb... and the fear of never being the same again.

So I walked around it.

Not by calculation, nor by strategy. But because my body chose that path without asking me. Because it needed to go around, graze, follow without crossing. Maybe to avoid breaking that fragile bond between distance and recognition. Maybe to avoid facing the vertigo of contact. I passed beside it, slowly, my steps weighted, held, as if the ground itself might react to the slightest misstep.

She didn’t vibrate.

Did not curl into herself. Did not defend herself. And above all... did not stop me.

She remained there, equal to herself, laid down without pressure, like an offering already ancient whose presence was enough. She sought neither to seduce, nor to remind. She was already forgetting me, or maybe she had never seen me.

And that, perhaps, was the most disturbing thing.

That she let me go.

Without resentment. Without whisper. Without that farewell shiver loved things sometimes leave in the air.

Just a silence. Soft. Accepting. As if my refusal was already part of the rite.

But I felt, in the hollow of my ribs, that she would follow me at a distance.

Not with steps. Not with eyes. Not like a classic presence, bound to a shape or warmth. No, it was finer, more diffuse, harder to grasp — like a slow condensation inside me, a soft pressure on the bones, on memory, on that mute zone between the ribcage and the recollection. A light sensation, but constant, imposing nothing, demanding nothing, yet persisting. Like the breath of a dream held back too long.

It wasn’t a fault.

It wasn’t even a mistake.

It was an absence that hadn’t cried.

A missed chance, not out of cowardice, but because of that subtle delay the soul sometimes needs to understand what’s unfolding. A thing one didn’t know how to respond to at the right time — not because it wasn’t loved, but because one wasn’t ready. Because one was still trembling. Because something inside hadn’t grown fast enough.

And so she stays.

Not to accuse. Not to remind. Not with resentment. But there. Simply there.

Like those figures we no longer see, but who still sit in our silences. Like a hand laid upon absence, that doesn’t weigh, doesn’t speak, but remains. That waits, maybe. Or doesn’t even know it waits. A soft vestige. A nameless loyalty.

And in that persistence, there was no cruelty.

Only a kind of bare truth, bare to the point of tenderness — the kind one cannot endure because it reproaches nothing.

And perhaps that was the heaviest part: that she wasn’t even trying to return.

She had become a contour. An internal shadow. A soft tension in the air surrounding my gestures. And with every step I took away, she didn’t retreat. She stayed behind, on the edge, just present enough for me to know she still existed, but never enough to make me return.

So I walked. Yes. But with that new hollow lodged beneath my ribs, that hollow that wasn’t empty. That hollow that pulsed.

And I understood that now, whatever I did, I would never be entirely alone again.

Not haunted.

But inhabited.

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