Anthesis of Sadness
Chapter 234: The Marsh Holds

Chapter 234: The Marsh Holds

I first believed that my feet had simply sunk. That the ground, spongy, treacherous, had given way all at once beneath the moist weight of my slow walk, as if the floor itself, tired of carrying me, decided to become muddy, to offer my steps a soft bed, permissive, almost affectionate, to swallow me gently. But it was not a fall. It was not a collapse. There was no brutal slide, no tipping. It was slower. More intimate. A sinking. Progressive. Patient. A long, almost tender gesture from something lurking just beneath the surface, which did not wait for me to fall, but to yield — and which, without violence, without sound, without biting or strangling, had closed its invisible lips around my ankles, not to punish me, but simply... to hold me.

As if my feet were the only things still confident enough to believe they were outside of me, and the world, tired of waiting for me fully, had decided to start with them.

I saw no edge. No bank. No clear line. The world was no longer made of contours. There was only this matter. This sweet, viscous, warm density. A ground without ground. A flesh without limit.

Every molecule seemed to hesitate between rejecting me or welcoming me, as if matter itself did not yet know whether I was an intruder or an offering.

It did not push me away. It did not capture me. It absorbed me. With a slowness that was not sadistic, but ancient. Inexorable. And that was what scared me — not the loss of mobility, no, but this welcoming silence, this moisture without conflict, this way the world had of incorporating me as if I had always been part of its density, as if my form were just a temporary detail it was time to dissolve.

I tried to lift a leg, just one. A test. A surge of will. But the matter responded. Not by opposition. By attachment. It stretched with me, without yielding, as if it refused to break the bond.

There was no struggle. Just a strange, tenacious fidelity, which wanted to continue being part of me even when I tried to leave.

The resistance was not muscular. It was affective. A sticky fidelity. And when my skin finally emerged, slowly, from that soft embrace, it was black, shiny, oozing, covered with a liquid without odor, but at the exact temperature of my own blood — which made me shiver more deeply than any burn.

I remained there, suspended in a semi-step, between the desire to disengage and the obscure intuition that moving too fast would provoke something.

I felt, under my skin, zones vibrating at a rhythm I didn’t recognize. As if a part of me was slowly tuning to a foreign memory.

My body was no longer entirely mine. It floated in between, half melted, half swallowed, and something — yes, something — pulsed beneath me. A weak but regular rhythm. It wasn’t my heart. It wasn’t my breath. It was something else. A slow, diffuse, foreign breath, but synchronized with my own tempo.

Not mere imitation. A real breath. But inverted. It was me who was becoming the lung.

As if the ground... breathed through me.

And that’s when I understood.

It wasn’t me who maintained the contact.

It was it that held me.

Not to prevent me from advancing. Not to devour me. Not even to possess me. It did not crush me. It read me. It perceived. It deciphered. Each gesture — each micro-movement I tried to extract myself — produced a long, horizontal shiver, a trembling in the matter that receded in waves, like a digestive signal, like a decoding breath. The marsh did not chain me. It interpreted my hesitations.

So I stopped moving.

Not to negotiate. Not to preserve myself. Instinctively. With troubled lucidity. Because I had understood — without understanding — that every resistance awakened something. Something asleep. A need. And I had no desire to know what this world might desire.

I slowly lowered my arms. My thoughts, too, had tense — despite me — in the silence.

But thoughts no longer had shelter. They poured through my head like sand in an open hand — visible, vulnerable, exposed to this eyelidless listening.

I tried to divert them. To dissolve them. But here... even thinking made vibrations.

And then...

a voice emerged.

Not in the air.

In my head.

But skewed. Foreign.

Or maybe not.

My voice, perhaps, but older. More weary.

One of those sentences thought too strongly, one day, and never dared aloud. A sentence I never formulated but that, since then, never quite silenced—

— I am tired of being read.

A sentence I didn’t even know I had in me. Like mental dust clumped over years, forming a murmur by mere saturation.

The ground reacted.

Subtly.

Not with spasm. Not with rejection.

A slow undulation. Like a nervous shiver traveling through a body without nerves. A profound, painful, mute listening.

And there... I understood.

That floor was not a trial.

It was not a test to pass. It asked nothing of me: no climb, no victory, no passage. It had no threshold to offer.

It did not seek to test me. It wanted to inhabit me, gently, as one waits for a room to resonate with a song it would recognize.

It wanted... me to stay. It wanted me to speak. Not loudly. Internally. It wanted me to tell my story. To dissolve into the murmur of my own unsaid words. It did not want my strength. It wanted... my framework.

But I had no framework left.

Only an entanglement of residues. Of refusals. Of silences.

So I did what I had long forgotten how to do: I resumed walking. Not to get out. Not to defy. But as one extricates oneself from a clammy dream. Slowly. Without seeking to break. Without seeking to flee. Only... to not collapse. To not fully belong.

And that’s when I saw it.

The first one.

A presence I had not sought, but that, as soon as it appeared, made me realize how alone I had remained until then — alone in absorption, alone in listening.

I don’t know what it was. A being? A plant? A memory standing upright?

At first, I thought it was a dead trunk. Twisted. Stripped of all bark. Standing there, like an organic ruin, a few meters away. But very quickly... I saw it was breathing. Slowly. Barely. With that infinitesimal cadence only alive beings without fear possess.

Its fibers pulsed. Not like veins. But like muscles without bones. A living mass without apparent will, but not without presence. And at the end of this form, there was something open. Not a mouth. Not an eye. A living, damp slit, from which emerged a thin filament, floating in the air with the sinister grace of roots searching for their soil.

It did not look at me.

It did not retreat.

It judged nothing.

It lived. There. In that marsh. With the unbearable slowness of those who have renounced all urgency.

And I, I walked.

Not to move forward.

To not stay.

To not be seen too long.

To not answer.

As if leaving was not movement, but betrayal. As if distancing myself without speaking, without offering, without opening... was a failure of a promise I had nonetheless never made.

But with each step...

the marsh, it, held me.

Not by force.

By listening.

And I grew more and more afraid — that it might one day be me, who would have to answer.

And that I would have... nothing left to say, except what I never wanted to say.