Anthesis of Sadness
Chapter 226: The Memory in the Hands

Chapter 226: The Memory in the Hands

I saw his hands before even understanding that it was what I was looking at, for they did not impose themselves as an evidence, nor even as a gesture, but appeared in the field of my perception with that sovereign discretion of things that have always been there, stretched out toward me without truly aiming at me, arms relaxed, palms offered to the sky in an attitude neither open nor closed, but simply shut — not closed by refusal, nor contracted by fear, just closed with that grave softness that things have when one keeps them without yet knowing their destination, as if one were watching over a secret whose importance one does not yet know, but that one has decided, nonetheless, not to betray.

Nothing in him moved, and it is precisely that stillness, bare, absolute, without apparent intention, that disturbed me — for that silence of gestures, that restraint without tension, without posture, without sign, bore within it a density more vibrant than any word, an expectation without demand, a threshold that was not erected but subtly laid down, at mid-height in the air, exactly where my thoughts collided with uncertainty, at that invisible fold between his fingers that I could not yet name, but toward which everything in me was already reaching.

It was not a defensive posture, nor a clear, identifiable, ritual offering; it was something else, perhaps older, even more subterranean, like an inverted tension, a gesture that did not come from him but from the fragment he contained, or held back, or simply let inhabit his hands without seeking to expel it, and that thing, which I could not see, which I did not want to guess too quickly, made me feel — with a dull, bodily certainty, without mental detour — that to ask the question, even inwardly, even in the silence of a barely formed thought, would be to break something irreversible, for he would then withdraw it, not out of anger or spite, but out of sheer necessity: because any attempt at understanding would betray a fear even greater than ignorance — the fear of receiving without control, without filter, without deciding.

He was not there to explain, not there to guide me, nor to convince me, and that very refusal to accompany me, that withdrawal without hostility, already said the essential: he was there to let me recover, not a bond with him, nor an answer, nor a revelation, but a piece of myself that I had, once, dropped somewhere, without even taking the time to look at its shape.

So I looked — not with the eyes of need, nor with the tension of expectation, but with that quality of gaze that emerges when one has already renounced understanding, when there remains only the capacity to inhabit the moment, to sink into the stillness of the other like into a mute, bottomless sea — and I contemplated his unmoving arms, the suspended slowness of his elbows, that almost inhuman way in which his fingers were closed, not to protect, not to isolate, but to contain, to hold without pressing, without filtering, as if they knew that what they carried must not be uttered, but simply transmitted at the right moment, in the rhythm proper to the one who draws near.

And in that silent observation, a shiver rose — not a shock, not a revelation, but a slow, dense intuition, heavy like a memory rising from the belly, an unspoken certainty that what he held there was not an object, nor a secret, nor even a symbol, but a fragment — a forgotten shard, rejected, erased perhaps, but not destroyed — an old piece of myself, torn away without violence, abandoned without hatred, just abandoned because I was too tired to carry it, to recognize it, to want it still.

And he, he had picked it up — or maybe not even that — he had simply received it, kept it between his hands without plan, without expectation, as if that fragment no longer belonged to anyone, as if it asked nothing, but simply waited for me to be, one day, quiet enough to approach it again.

And I did not know what it was — I knew neither its exact shape, nor its content, nor the wound it carried — but I knew what I had to do, I knew it with that obscure clarity that needs no words: I had to lower myself, bend, not to ask, not to pray, but to reach a level of presence that I could not touch while standing.

So I knelt — slowly, without dramatic tension, without heroism, but with that discreet gravity of bodies that remember that certain things can only be received at the cost of a lightening, of a loss of inner altitude — and in that gesture, there was no humiliation, no submission, only a silent recognition that I could not, without that bend of the body, cross that threshold.

But even there, even at that diminished height, even in that physical opening that made me more fragile and closer, a resistance remained — not a clear refusal, not a loud fear, but an underground tension, lodged somewhere in the spine, between the base of the skull and the hollow of the loins, like an organic memory whispering that to accept, here, would also be to betray a version of myself that had held on until now without that fragment, that had survived by refusal, by flight, by stubbornness, and that might die if I reclaimed what I myself had once pushed away.

But despite that, despite that bodily reluctance, I reached out my hands — not as a noble gesture, not as an offering, but as a pure release, a gesture without language, a way of saying: I am here, empty, porous, permeable, and I no longer know what I’m waiting for, but I accept needing what I can no longer name.

And then, in a silence so thick it seemed to have densified the air around us, his hands opened.

The gesture was almost imperceptible, so slow, so contained, that even the space around seemed hesitant to turn it into an event; there was no light, no beat, no clear manifestation — only a breath, or something like it, a warm, discreet quiver, an ancient sliding, like a heat that does not burn, but that wraps, slowly, around the palm, and that enters — not like an energy, nor like a signal — but like an imprint, like a memory come back to settle into its old bed.

And I felt, in my hands first, then in the skin, then in the breath line, then all the way into the arch of my back, that this fragment was not settling like a recovered piece, but like a readjusted tension — not a healing, not a repair, but an inner shift, a minuscule, almost shameful reorganization, which restored nothing but finally allowed me to continue differently.

And around me... nothing moved.

But the air, the space, the ground perhaps, seemed, for a moment, to hold back their vibration. As if the world itself, in its uterine softness, had suspended its breath to let me incorporate what had once left me.

And I did not cry. I did not speak.

But I knew — deeply, silently — that something had just been given back to me.

Not so that I might become again.

But so that I might become otherwise.

And that... would be enough.

Or perhaps... it would begin.