Anthesis of Sadness
Chapter 224: The Modified Inner Map

Chapter 224: The Modified Inner Map

I had been walking for a long time. Too long. Or maybe not.

Because here... time doesn’t weigh. It doesn’t flow. It doesn’t settle like elsewhere. It dissolves. Slowly. Silently. Like a lukewarm vapor you don’t feel, but that erases outlines. It’s not that it passes. It’s that it ceases to exist the moment you try to catch it. It becomes something else — a sensation without duration, a substance without weight.

Like sounds. Like memories. Like boundaries.

Everything slips. Nothing holds. Sounds no longer echo, thoughts fade before they even take shape, and places themselves seem hesitant to fully exist. It’s not a desert. It’s not a dream. It’s a grey zone, slow, soft, where each step forgets itself in the next.

I no longer knew if I was moving forward.

Maybe I was repeating.

Maybe I was turning in circles, in a world that doesn’t say no, that corrects nothing, that simply absorbs. It doesn’t judge my steps. It doesn’t resist my breath. It accompanies me like one accompanies a sleeper — with a mute, almost awkward gentleness.

And that silence, that blur, that causeless fatigue... all of it ended up inhabiting me. Passing through me. As if the world no longer surrounded me, but flowed through me, gently, porous. Without shock. Without shape.

I was walking. Yes.

But I no longer knew what I was passing through.

Maybe I wasn’t passing through anything.

Maybe I was passing through myself.

But that day — or that moment, I couldn’t tell — something changed. It wasn’t abrupt. It wasn’t visible. Nothing cracked, nothing fell, nothing screamed. The world around me kept its soft opacity, that endless torpor in which time clings to nothing. No, it wasn’t outside that something shifted. It was inside. Something in me had slipped. Not like an alarm. Not like a breach. More like a displacement. A slow, silent readjustment of something old — something familiar, heavy, that I thought fixed in place, and which no longer was.

It wasn’t pain. Not fatigue. Not even lack. It was... something else. More discreet. More intimate. Like when a piece of furniture never moved is, one morning, slightly shifted, and no one remembers doing it. A slight dissymmetry. A new tension in the body’s balance. A memory that no longer holds quite the same way.

A weight.

Yes.

An old weight, worn, almost a part of me — but which, suddenly, was no longer exactly where I had left it.

That slight shift... was enough to unsettle everything.

I stopped. Not abruptly, not like one facing danger or surprise. Just... I stopped walking. Because something in me no longer followed. I still carried my body, yes — my footing held, the muscles responded, breath flowed. But a deeper part, more underground, seemed to have begun a movement that didn’t include me. It wasn’t a parasite, nor a foreign presence. It wasn’t an object lodged in me, nor a memory returning to strike. No. It was a knot. A displaced knot.

Something I had always felt, just below the diaphragm — there, between the end of breath and the beginning of silence, at the exact spot where unspoken things lodge. A compact mass, mute, sometimes painful, but stable. A subterranean hearth of all I had never known how to express. An identity-pain. A raw condensation of all I had swallowed. It had always been there. Like an invisible center of gravity. Like an inner stone around which I had built myself.

And now... it was moving.

Slowly. Almost imperceptibly. But I felt it. Not through a clear sensation, but by the absence it left in moving. A strange void, a slackening where everything seemed more fragile, more hollow, as if my inner balance had slipped by a millimeter.

And that shift... was enough to make everything tremble.

It was sliding slightly.Not upward. Not downward. No. To the side.An oblique movement, slow, smooth, almost ashamed. Like something that didn’t want to be seen, trying to move away from the heart without entirely fleeing. A soft migration, internal, almost respectful, but irreversible. As if it were seeking a new place. As if, for the first time, it refused to be at the center. Refused to be the core around which I existed. It moved away. Shifted. Not violently, but out of weariness. Or by choice.

So I placed my hand on my belly. Instinctively. With that confused expectation of finding... something. A bump, a warmth, a tension. A physical proof that I hadn’t dreamed the movement. That it wasn’t just an inner mirage, a vertigo of consciousness. But there was nothing.

Nothing.

No swelling.

No heat.

No lump.

The skin was smooth. The muscle, calm. The breath, unchanged. And yet... I knew. I knew it had moved. That it had chosen not to inhabit that point anymore. That it had deserted its throne of mute pain.

That silence... squeezed me tighter than the pain before.

But inside... something no longer held.

I felt as though I was no longer symmetrical. Not geometrically. But more deeply. More intimately. As if my axis had shifted, as if an invisible line, buried at the center of me until then, had been pushed aside, silently, smoothly, but with certainty. A part of me had slipped — not abruptly, not in escape, but gently, like one leaving a place held too long. It had laid itself on its side, without warning me, and I didn’t know if it was a sign of evolution... or a fracture.

Maybe it was both. Maybe growing always feels a little like breaking.

I stood there, motionless, without pain, without sweat, without fever. And yet, all in me vibrated with slight imbalance. As if my own verticality no longer matched my skeleton. As if the center of my body no longer matched that of my being.

And in that shift... something was beginning to be born.

Or to detach.

I tried to speak. Even in silence. Even without words.

Just to feel what it would do, what it would stir in me — like testing a quiet vibration, a simple ripple of presence to check if the inside still responded.

But my thoughts echoed poorly.

They no longer carried. They struck invisible walls, new angles I didn’t recognize. As if the echo had changed direction. As if the very shape of my interiority had been modified without my noticing. There was a displacement. Not of ideas, not of breath. But of structure. As if the resonance chamber of my being — that space where emotions strike before rising to the throat — had been... moved.

It no longer vibrated under the same vault.

In that slight dissonance, there was something off. Something slightly false. Not monstrously. Not painfully. But enough to doubt the sound. To doubt oneself.

As if the inner voice I had always known now came from a place where I didn’t expect it.

And that simple gap... was enough to make everything tremble.

I sat down.

Slowly, without jolt, like sinking into something deeper than the ground. Not to rest. Not to catch my breath. But because my balance no longer responded the same way. Because simply standing, at that moment, seemed to require a stability I no longer possessed. So I let myself fold. And in that gesture, in that simple posture — finally still — I perceived what had changed.

For the first time in a long while... I didn’t fully recognize what I felt.

It wasn’t foreign.

It wasn’t an intrusion, nor an anomaly. It wasn’t a cry from elsewhere. It was mine. Deeply mine. But differently. Like a displaced version of something I had always known. A grafted emotion. A transplanted memory. An ancient breath, but relocated. A heartbeat that hadn’t changed rhythm, but which, suddenly, didn’t seem to come from the same heart.

Like a transplanted organ.

Like a displaced breath.

Like a memory that, without changing, ceases to be central.

It doesn’t disappear. It doesn’t fall silent. But it becomes... peripheral. It settles elsewhere, in a zone we never used to consult. And then the whole self must adapt. Recompose. Relearn the inner map.

And I, sitting there, no longer quite knew from which point I was breathing.

Then I knew.

Not like one understands. Not like one discovers.

But like one recognizes, from one breath to another, that a space has opened. That a knot has loosened. That an old lock, silently, slid on its own into forgetting. Something in me had moved. Had shifted. Not to flee, not to disappear. But to let me breathe.

And in that breath, in that infinitesimal widening inside, there was a vertigo. That of relief, yes. But also of absence. Because if that thing was no longer at the center... then I would have to live differently. I would have to inhabit a redrawn body. A displaced self.

I didn’t yet know what that would imply.

I didn’t yet know what I would have to carry in its place.

But I knew that space would not remain empty. Never.

And that what I placed there — or what came to settle there — would once again change... the heart of who I was.