Anthesis of Sadness
Chapter 227: The Gentle Discordance

Chapter 227: The Gentle Discordance

I did not reach out my hands to grasp. Not out of restraint, nor out of fear of disturbing the fragile balance of what was unfolding there, but because I knew — with a certainty that had no name, but already held the texture of the body — that touching was not necessary, that what was presenting itself to me could not be received by the skin, nor even intercepted by a gesture, however gentle, however bare it might be, because it did not ask for action, but for space, not for impulse, but for porosity. It was less about opening than about forgetting oneself. Less about reaching than becoming porous. It was not about wanting, but about letting it happen.

I did not need to touch, no, because what he was returning to me... did not weigh anything. Not even a little. It was not an object. Not a weight. Not a substance. It was a breath, too old to still seek a form, too old to even desire having one anymore. It slid between his fingers without sound, without friction, like a memory passing through a body without resistance, a vibration, a lukewarm warmth, a formless pulsation, almost without direction — like an idea that had been left to sleep for so long it had forgotten its own name, its own voice, and which came back now, fragile, trembling, without language. A presence that hesitated, as if it too doubted whether it still had the right to exist.

I did not grasp it. It would be false to say I received it. It was not handed over, nor offered, nor transmitted with intention. It came. To me. Not through movement, not through distance, but through gliding. Directly. Not into the hands. Not into the eyes. Not into the skin.

Into the chest.

And there was neither pain, nor piercing, nor impact. It struck nothing. It split nothing. It did not impose itself.

It integrated.

And that moment, though so tenuous, so invisible, provoked a strange reaction, almost imperceptible, but total — a shiver, fine, precise, just under the sternum, as if the flesh had remembered too late that it had been crossed, as if a light wave, soft but unusual, had nestled where nothing had pulsed for a long time. A new pulsation, timid, but obstinate, as if the body had been brushed by a season it believed lost.

And yet, in this strangeness, I knew immediately. It was not an intrusion. It was not a gift from elsewhere. It was mine. Or more precisely: it had been. But what I recognized was not what I was expecting. It was not a return. It was not a restoration. It was a misalignment. A persistence from a former self I had never really known how to name, and which, nonetheless, returned to me with the quiet obviousness of an organ one hadn’t quite lost. Something that had survived, not by strength, but by forgetfulness — and which now flowed back to me like a soft but distorted memory.

But the more I felt it vibrate... the more something in me opposed it.

Not on the outside.

Inside.

Not violently. Not in rejection. But in that dull inertia of things that refuse to be called by their name. My own body — not the surface, but the deep layers, the mute density within — seemed not to recognize it. Or rather, it still resisted admitting that it had truly lost it, one day, at a moment too distant for memory to speak it, but not distant enough for the body to ignore. There was an old crack there, a forgotten fold, a crease of absence that presence awakened too gently to tear open.

It did not hurt. It invaded nothing. It did not impose its presence. It settled.

With slowness.

With that patience that only fragments possess, those that know they have never stopped waiting.

It embraced my contours — not those of the visible torso, but those of the inner space, of the invisible folds of breath, those I had not inhabited for so long that they had become mute. It sought its place, not with urgency, nor with pain, but with that gentle persistence of things that do not know how to return, but return nonetheless. A silent fidelity, almost embarrassed, like a hand still extended in the shadows.

And every heartbeat, now, resonated differently. In the rib cage. In the very texture of the silence around. As if a second rhythm had slipped into the former one, misaligned, autonomous. And I, I no longer knew whether I should flee it, retune it... or simply survive its strangeness. There was no pain, but there was a discordance, as if my body were singing in two voices, without knowing which to follow.

A memory? Perhaps. An instinct? Perhaps that too. A forgotten organ? I did not know. But what I did know, what I could no longer ignore, was that it did not vibrate to my rhythm. No. It beat beside it. It beat differently.

It had kept its own tempo. As if the world, in its slow digestion of absences, had nourished it with a breath other than mine. And I, standing in that soft room, between a departure that had never happened and a return that no longer fully belonged to me, I was no longer sure how to welcome it. Nor whether I still should. Can one embrace what has lived without us? Can one love what has survived outside of us?

So I lowered my head. Not out of shame. Nor even out of disturbance. But because the body, at some point, knows better than the mind when it must yield. I placed a hand on my chest — not to soothe it, nor to contain it, but to feel. To check. To question the ground beneath the breath.

And in that contact — so simple, so human — I felt a subtle discordance, almost invisible, but irrefutable. As if my skin, beneath my fingers, no longer quite belonged to me. As if something, underneath, was beating without my knowing. With love perhaps — yes, there was a gentleness — but still without me. As if this fragment still carried the memory of another rhythm, another body, another wound — and was asking me, silently, if I was ready to become that other.

And when I looked up again, the being was no longer there.

It had not faded.

It had not disappeared into the light, nor fled into a dream.

It had returned to where it needed to be, where it had always been, where only I could one day join it, if the breath managed to retune itself.

Now that I had received what I had never dared to ask for, now that I had accepted what I did not know I had lost... it no longer had to stay.

And I, alone at the center of that soft room, between absence and return, between the former heart and the new beat, I could not tell whether I had just healed... or if something within me had simply begun to vibrate to a frequency that no longer quite belonged to me — but which, nonetheless, now... would be mine.