Anthesis of Sadness
Chapter 232: What the Eyeless Gaze Sees

Chapter 232: What the Eyeless Gaze Sees

I believed, for a moment, that silence would be enough to shelter me. That sitting there, within the porosity of a breath that had become almost slow, almost disembodied, would be enough to erase my form — or at least blur it just enough to no longer truly exist, for the world to stop holding me by the shoulders, or for me simply to stop holding myself within it. I still believed that the erasure would come from outside, that silence, if it pressed close enough to me, if it clung to my folds like a blind balm, would end up silencing also that which, within me, still trembled without daring to name itself. But very quickly... something stopped me.

Not a sound. Not a shape. Nothing visible. Nothing conscious.

Something prior to contact. Something older than the gaze. A naked perception, raw, embedded in the weave of reality, a sensation of already being seen, even before having moved, before even thinking I needed to hide. And that something... was watching.

But not from behind. Not from a shadow. Not from a physical presence, nor even from a memory lodged in the mind. There was no pupil, no breath on the neck, no displacement of air — nothing that could have justified the impression. Yet it was there. Dense. Inexplicable. A gaze without eyes, without direction, stretched toward me without tension, but with that unbearable stillness of something that does not seek to understand: only to be there. Present. Steady. Irrefutable.

Not like an arrow.

Like an atmosphere.

An inward gaze, but off-center, displaced, slipped not into the heart of myself, but into a minuscule fissure I had never known how to name — perhaps between two thoughts, or between two layers of silence, as if something, or someone, had found a fold in my consciousness, a soft crevice in the flesh of the mind, and had settled there not to hide, but to wait for me.

There was no fear.

No threat.

But that constant, disarmed, almost clinical exposure, that strange sensation of being read more than seen, of being opened without pain, like when one realizes they are being pierced by a light without shadow. Not an observation. A gentle dissection. An involuntary opening. A body not offered, but that gave way anyway, without a cry, under the mute eye of another.

So I moved.

Not to flee.

By reflex. To test myself. To see if that gaze depended on my movements, if it followed or preceded, if it was a projection of my fears or a real presence, rooted in the very ground of this world. I stood slowly, like one leaving too still a dream, and I followed the soft walls of the place, those supple membranes that barely quivered under my passage, as if they breathed for me. I passed through a fibrous, spiral fold, like a vertical intestine, a bowel of the world in which the air became thicker, denser, almost liquid — air that had to be swallowed, chewed, digested, it clung so tightly to the throat.

But nothing changed.

The gaze remained.

Not on me. Not fixed to my skin. Not directed at my limbs or my actions. No. It tracked nothing. It did not follow my movements. It did not mirror my choices. It sought nothing.

It was lodged behind my eyes.

And what it saw... was not the world.

It was what I saw of the world.

And that, precisely, is what broke me: that gentle but irreversible fracture between the object seen and the seeing eye — as if, from now on, what mattered was no longer what I saw... but how I looked. My gaze became the center of the gaze. My attention was observed. My reactions... weighed. Not for their content, but for their mechanics. For their rhythm.

And what I sensed there... was not a judgment. Not a test. Not even an expectation.

It was a strange patience. Cold. Still. A bare curiosity, without warmth, but without cruelty — as if I were being watched not as a being, nor as a threat, nor even as a mystery... but as a phenomenon. A phase. A becoming. A rhythm. As if I were being seen from within time, not from a place.

I was the experiment.

I was no longer the bearer.

So I stopped.

Not to confront. Not to challenge. But because moving no longer had an effect. No longer had meaning. Movement altered nothing. It did not disturb the presence. It did not unsettle the gaze.

I wanted to speak.

Not to name. Just to break something. To see if my voice still belonged to me. But the moment the thought had formed... the echo returned to me. Not in the ears. Not like a sound. But in the space that watched me — from within.

— You thought you could hide. But you were seen long before you feared being seen.

The sentence was not spoken. It was not heard. It had no timbre, no weight, no direction. And yet... it had passed through me. Like a truth too ancient to still need to be formulated. It did not come from me. It did not come from the other. It came... from in-between.

From a mental threshold.

From a tipping point.

And yes.

It was true.

I was not naked.

I was read.

I was not unarmed.

I was deciphered.

And this gaze — or this fragment — or this memory lodged in a breath that no longer belonged to me — was not trying to condemn, nor to comfort, nor even to heal. It wanted to understand. What I was becoming. What becomes of a being like me, when he finally stops resisting.

And me... I no longer knew.

I no longer knew when I had stopped standing at the center. When I was no longer the origin of my voice. When I had begun to echo, through my gestures, the remnants of a memory vaster than mine. I no longer knew from which fracture I had ceased to be the subject. But I knew it now: I was no longer alone in seeing. I was no longer alone in feeling.

There was no escape.

Only a choice.

Let it see.

Or... open in turn.

But for that, everything had to be shown. Everything had to be surrendered. Even what I had never dared to look at myself. Even what I believed I had erased. What still trembles, deep in the breath. What beats beneath each silence.

And that...

I didn’t yet know if I was capable of it.

But it — or she — or he — waited.

Without demanding. Without warning. Without asking questions.

Just there.

Present.

In me.

And it waited.

Not for my words.

For my surrender.