Anthesis of Sadness
Chapter 229: The Crossed Body

Chapter 229: The Crossed Body

I kept walking — not out of a desire to move forward, nor even as a conscious evasion of what I was, slowly, subtly, becoming, but because a remnant of motion, lodged in my tissues, still survived the exhaustion of will. A flow of gentle inertia, like a fossilized beat from an ancient rhythm, something older than me, than my fatigue, than my fear, which replayed itself through my gestures, without prompting, without order, without clear memory — simply because there was nothing else left to do but continue. A current inherited from a forgotten breath which, perhaps, guided me not towards a place, but towards a form of hollow survival, a faint possibility of not entirely sinking. Or at least, of not sinking alone.

But I no longer knew what I was walking with.

Nor with whom.

Because if my body, yes, still followed — if my legs bent, if my feet landed one after the other in a worn regularity, almost animal, almost somnambulistic, like a machine turned toward the simple fact of existing — another part of me, more interior, more troubled, more vacant even than confused, had already shifted.

Not elsewhere in space.

Not upstream in time.

Not into a vision.

But into another inside.

An inside that had not been planned, that had never been announced, but which, since the moment of contact, had opened. Not brutally, not through breaking in, but through progressive release, through the slow crumbling of a boundary I hadn’t even known I’d erected. An inside without walls, without contour, without function, but whose very vacuity became a surface of welcome. Something within me had been hollowed out. An echo chamber born of absence, a habitable void for what, until then, had found neither form nor address.

What I had received — that displaced breath, that oblique beat, that unplaceable fragment, that unnamed remnant — had not dissolved. It had not withdrawn. It had neither exploded nor fled. It had stayed. There. Present. Stable. Almost calm. As if it had always been there, lurking, silent, waiting for the precise space that would allow it to exist without excess, without overflow, without claim — a discreet entity that did not seek to be welcomed, but simply not to be refused.

It did not invade me.

It did not try to blend in.

It persisted — without violence, without tension, but with that neutral gravity of things that know they cannot leave. It had lodged itself in that neutral zone between breath and memory, between skin and organ, where one never feels anything — except when something changes. And now... something had changed. Not a rupture. Not a split. But a tilt. A gentle misalignment of rhythm. A slow shift of the center.

It did not speak.

It did not impose.

It never articulated itself.

But it vibrated.

At times. In hollows. In intervals. In slow waves, almost timid. It escaped itself. It did not want to identify. It only wanted to coexist. To exist. There. To be there, in silence, in slowness, in the absence of design. And the more I let it be, the more it found, inside me, new zones to traverse, forgotten furrows to embrace, as if it were redrawing my silences with its own curves. It replaced nothing. It revealed what I had never inhabited.

And I listened to it. Not to understand.

But because it was there. Because it insisted. Because it passed through everything. Because it stirred what, in me, had ceased to be heard. Because even without language, it resonated in the depths of the fibers, where the body keeps track of mute presences.

I asked no question.

I did not try to know.

I constructed no meaning.

Because there was no meaning. Not yet. Perhaps never. Or perhaps meaning, here, was not to be constructed, but to be allowed to emerge — as one lets a shadow fall on a wall without seeking its source. As one lets a vibration settle in without trying to name it.

There was only this continuous presence, this organic fluidity, invisible but insistent, which altered the breath, stretched the rhythm, changed the very grain of my breathing. And that alone was enough to shift everything. Because everything that passes through breath transforms. And I did not feel changed. I felt crossed. Altered from within. As if my body, slowly, was becoming an instrument tuned to a foreign — but welcomed — vibration.

Because the more I accepted it — or rather: the more I stopped denying it — the more I felt that my gaze no longer quite belonged to me. Not that it had blurred, nor shifted, nor broken. But what it encountered... no longer responded in the same way. As if the world, suddenly, had begun to respond to a rhythm other than mine.

The world, in front, had not changed.

But its attitude had.

The walls surrounding me, once dense, organic, flaccid, thick like nourishing flesh or traps, now seemed attentive, no longer reactive, no longer impassive, but as if suspended in a slow, warm waiting, that judged nothing but observed, in return, the inner disturbance that animated me. A silence that was no longer neutral. But charged. Inhabited. As if the space, too, was waiting.

I placed my hand on one of them.

It did not tense.

It did not close.

But it breathed — with me. Not against me. With. Through. A soft, living membrane, warm, almost imperceptibly pulsed, as if my palm had joined another breath. And beneath my fingers, I felt a faint vibration. A breath. Not a resonance. Not a response. A discreet harmonization, implicit. A silent recognition.

As if this world had recognized, in what I now carried, something that belonged to it.

Not as a double.

Not as a brother.

But as a threshold.

And then I understood — without words, without reflection, without conclusion.

I was no longer an intruder.

I was no longer a fugitive.

I was no longer a traveler adrift in a world that rejected me.

I had become a threshold.

A bearer.

A place of passage.

For what? For whom? I still did not know. Perhaps for nothing. Perhaps just to welcome. To let pass. To not close. Perhaps simply so that a breath — a single one — might continue to vibrate somewhere, even without use, even without design.

And what I carried — that breath from elsewhere, that memory without origin, that voice without intention — did not seek to be used.

It only asked for a space to persist a little longer.

Not to last.

Not to shine.

Not to transmit.

Just not to be lost.

And even though I still understood nothing of the consequences of this silent cohabitation, even though I knew neither its origin nor its end, I no longer resisted. Because to resist, here, would have been to close a passage that only asked to remain open. A membrane. A link. A vibration.

I no longer protected my inner boundaries.

I no longer tried to discern what was me from what was not.

I let this presence live. Breathe. Vibrate.

I let it glide between my fibers without trying to contain it.

I let it recompose me without trying to restore myself.

I let it unfold its texture through my breath, without altering the grain, without imposing my logic.

I let it reverberate in my silences, slowly, until those silences became living matter.

I let it carve out new zones in me, not to fill them, but to give them a habitable shape.

I let it stretch my being, without direction, without purpose, just to make space exist.

And for the first time — perhaps ever — I needed no narrative.

I needed no proof.

I needed no after.

The very fact that this thing still vibrated, in me, even without a face, even without direction, even without a future — was enough to remind me that I was no longer merely a walking body, but a body crossed through, an inhabited breath, a silence become threshold.

And that, without end or formulation,

was — at last — enough.

For today.

And for what comes.