Anthesis of Sadness
Chapter 233: The Silent Threshold

Chapter 233: The Silent Threshold

I don’t know when the texture of the ground changed. I couldn’t even say if there was a moment. Maybe it’s me who didn’t feel it coming. Maybe my feet, too busy surviving to warn me, stopped transmitting what they were treading, or my knees, worn from bearing the weight of a silence that no longer belongs to me, unlearned how to discern what truly supports them. Or maybe... I simply no longer listen to myself walking. I move forward without contact. Without feedback. My body, from carrying a silenced voice, a foreign breath, has forgotten that it too could be heard.

Maybe walking itself has become a reflex. A trance of forgetting. As if movement replaced presence, as if advancing was enough to simulate existence a little longer, even without truly inhabiting it.

But suddenly... a sound.

Not a noise. No. Not something that alerts, that bursts, that cuts.

A sound too soft. Too dense. Too organic. A contained sliding, almost intimate, as if I had just, without knowing it, pressed on a buried sentence. An old sentence, never spoken, but still there — lodged in the matter, in the fibers, in a layer of the world I didn’t know was alive, but that had kept everything.

A sentence that perhaps had waited for someone to awaken it. Not to be heard, but to be shared. Recognized. Like a secret buried not out of shame, but necessity — and that, now, can no longer remain silent.

And that’s what I’m walking on, now. On unspoken confessions. Thoughts never articulated. Remnants of myself I thought erased, digested, forgotten — but which the ground retained. Not to punish me. But to remind me.

I keep moving forward. One step. Two. Three. Without haste. Without real breath. But with that strange tension, as if each contact beneath my feet awakened a layer of fossilized language.

And with each step, something in me unravels. Not out of pain, nor even memory, but a kind of ancient language, which my muscles reread unknowingly, which my bones recite without understanding.

And then I stop.

Something, without explaining it, holds me back. It is no longer ground. No longer a docile material, nor even a support. It is... something else.

A tongue.

A vast tongue without a mouth.

A lake of stretched flesh, of nervous memory, of saturated silence. A spread-out eardrum, taut to the limit of rupture, as if the entire world, here, had become an ear — not to hear, but to absorb. Not a swamp of water. No. A swamp of nerves. Of living matter. A field of pure listening, without filter, without intention, saturated not with absence but with attention.

I feel the moment shift. That my presence, until now tolerated, wavers on a thread. That the world still gives me one chance, a tiny one, not to become one residue too many. And yet, I think.

So, without word, without voice, without gesture... I think.

What is this...?

And instantly, the world responds.

Not with a sound. Not with an image. Not even with a shiver.

It responds with an undulation.

There, beneath me. At the exact point where my thought had just resonated.

An infinitesimal crease. A barely visible retraction. A skin that tightens, folds, imperceptibly alters its surface as if it flinched at the touch of my question.

And I understand, immediately, with that slow lucidity of vital intuitions: it heard. Or rather... it perceived. It absorbed the vibration of my thought. It reacted to what I did not say. To what I was, for a moment of doubt.

Because to vibrate here is to awaken what sleeps under the skin of the world. It’s to brush against a listening too vast, too patient, to ever escape it.

Here, to think is to speak. To think is to vibrate. And to vibrate... is already too much.

I step back, one step behind, without thinking. It’s instinctive. Primal. An animal defense.

The surface... closes again.

It becomes smooth again, taut, calm — but not indifferent. It still listens to me. It hasn’t calmed down: it has prepared itself. As if it still accepted my presence, on the condition that I speak no more. That I even stop thinking.

And suddenly, I understand that I am not the one to ask the questions. That every internal formulation is an intrusion, a rupture in the accord. To think here is to force. To scratch a living surface with the nails of a language that should not exist there.

I try a half-step forward.

And the vibration starts again.

Discreet. Measured. But undeniable.

It perceives.

It knows.

And in that knowledge, there is no will. No distinct consciousness. Just an absorption mechanism. Every thought I form is captured. Every intention becomes a disturbance. A cry in the water.

I freeze.

It is not fear that rises. Not the fear of immediate danger. It’s something else. Older. An anguish lodged in the archaic folds of being. The kind that comes from needing to fall entirely silent. Not out of caution, nor to escape a visible threat — but because here, to think... is to be digested.

I formulate. Slowly. Unhurried. A conscious thought. Fragile. Stripped of defense:

Do you understand me?

And then...

The surface tenses.

Slightly. Just enough to break the horizontality.

As if my — silent — thought had pierced a membrane. A black bubble rises. Viscous. Detached from the bottom. Without speed. Without aim. An opaque, formless shape that does not speak, does not beat, does not truly approach.

But it watches.

And in that absence of gaze — in that eyeless gaze — I understand: it is not ground. It is not a swamp. It is a consciousness. A flat mind. A being spread out, without outline, without name, extending in matter like a horizontal brain. It does not see. It does not answer. It assimilates.

It digests.

Every word. Every mental sentence. Every inner vibration — even silent, even withheld — it incorporates them. And I feel, beneath the ribs, slowly, an ancient fear resurfacing. Because I know — with an organic, animal certainty — that if I continue like this, thinking with words, structuring my doubts, forming intentions... I will be integrated. I will become an archive in its memory. A digested form.

Otherwise, it will reconfigure me. Reduce me to an imprint. To a wave fixed in its texture. I will be only the memory of a word, of a heartbeat, of a doubt.

I must go silent.

Not in gestures. Not in words.

Inside.

I must extinguish thought.

I am afraid. Not of being swallowed, but of being kept. Preserved. Studied from within, without ever being able to answer.

So, slowly, I bend.

I yield. Not like one defeated. Not like a penitent. But like a cell trying to align with the tissue. I kneel without weight. I place my hands. The ground is warm. It pulses softly, almost compassionately. It does not repel. It waits.

So I try.

Not to formulate anymore.

Not to think in sentences. To abolish language.

I try something else: a naked presence. A de-boned thought. A dismantled intention. No words. No image. Just a breath.

A rhythm.

An inner swaying.

An offered absence.

And then...

the matter responds.

Not through absorption.

But through synchronization.

It does not calm. It does not yield. It breathes.

With me.

And that breath... has nothing human. It does not imitate. It does not expect. It is there, always has been, like a base, a foundational sea I had never known how to hear. It precedes me.

A silent cohabitation. A shared pulse. No fusion. No grasp. A reciprocal listening. A shared tension. A resonance.

It is a precarious alliance. Nothing is promised. But I feel — in the exact hollow of that non-defensive silence — that we can coexist, for a moment. That I can, perhaps, stop disturbing.

And in that resonance... I understand.

This world does not await my answers.

It waits for me to stop wanting to give them.

It waits for me to fall silent differently.

To become transparent.

A threshold.

A receiver.

And there, only there — for the first time — I am not absorbed.

I am not dissolved.

I am held.

Because I have ceased to formulate.

And at the very heart of that absence...

I have begun to exist otherwise.

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