Anthesis of Sadness
Chapter 237: What Calls When I Step Back

Chapter 237: What Calls When I Step Back

I thought it would be enough to turn away.

That a simple retreat — even barely begun — would free me from what I had just brushed against. That there existed, somewhere in this world without slope or wall, a possibility of a blind spot, a direction toward forgetting, a mental about-face capable of silently dissolving what I was not ready to look at.

I wanted to believe one could slip away silently, that turning the eye was enough to dissolve the echo.

But here...

nothing disappears.

I long believed it was enough to change the angle. That consciousness needed a frame, an axis, a fixed point to survive. But here, there is no more angle. No up. No down. Nothing that allows fear to be framed, the unbearable to be located. Every attempt at orientation spins uselessly, as if space itself refused to give me a direction behind which to hide. And it’s in this absence of bearings that the subtlest form of presence is born: the one that forces me to stay, naked, facing what I have not named.

I could still feel, at the hollow of my neck, the barely perceptible breath of an ancient memory — not a thought, not an image, but a weight from before. A shapeless density, perhaps forgotten, but never absent. As if the marsh, without biting, was pointing to me. Not to accuse me. To include me. To remind me that everything I leave behind becomes matter, here. Soft matter, but alive. A flesh of compacted forgetting that waits for one thing only: my breach.

Even forgetting is heard.

Everything I leave... calls.

I didn’t flee. I didn’t walk. I didn’t turn my head.

I just let my gaze drift away by a centimeter. I slightly bent a shoulder. A tiny tension in the neck. A clenching, almost reflexive, as if my back wanted to say "no" before my mouth even knew.

I didn’t want to call. But I was calling anyway. All it took was one misplaced sigh, one shoulder too quickly slumped, for the world to understand. This world doesn’t wait for words. It senses intention, it tastes tension. It doesn’t read my gestures — it absorbs them. It prolongs them. As if the slightest hesitation became a full declaration here.

This world doesn’t interpret. It digests. It takes what I don’t say, what I mask in shoulder twitches or trapped sighs, and extracts a truth I’ve never spoken. It doesn’t look at me like a mirror. It ingests me, slowly, to better spit me back out — transformed. And in this transformation, it’s not the form that changes, but the threshold: the exact place where I still thought I could stay silent.

And already, the world was responding.

Not with a sound. Not with a scream. Not even with a force.

With a brush.

An immaterial, but precise contact. A reversed pressure, soft, slipped between my shoulder blades — not an attack, no, but a restraint, a solicitation, an attention. Something that didn’t impose itself, but didn’t leave either. A diffuse awareness, placed there. Just there. Like a hand without a body. Like a listening without a voice.

There was, in this lack of tangible contact, something more intrusive than any bite. A radical form of listening, almost maternal, but of an inverted maternity — not the one that protects, but the one that demands. A tenderness without skin, that asks without begging. A dense expectation, that doesn’t knock on the door, but dissolves the lock.

It wasn’t pressure. It was an invitation by omission.

I didn’t jump.

I closed my eyes.

And I waited for it to leave.

But it didn’t leave.

On the contrary.

It spread.

Not like a touch. Not like matter. More like a fabric. A membrane of silence woven from the place I had tried to flee — and which now unfolded through me, without violence, but with that slow and precise insistence that the oldest memories sometimes have, when they don’t want to return... but can no longer stay absent.

Like a liquid that doesn’t seek to invade, but to slip in. It didn’t force its way in. It became internal without crossing a threshold. It insinuated itself into my fibers, into my muscular folds, where I had stored what I didn’t want to feel. And I understood that this fabric was not something external, but the exact extension of my refusal. An underground condensation of my past silences, taking shape before I even had time to say no.

And what I perceived then...

was not a word.

It was the idea of a word.

Or its trace. Or its taste. A word that had not yet taken shape. That had not been born, or had collapsed too early. A word never spoken aloud — because it was too intimate, or too shameful, or simply... too exact.

This word, or this absence of a word, came from farther back than me. From older. It seemed carried by an echo so ancient it was no longer sonic, but cellular. It had traveled by capillarity, slowly, along the path of my accumulated silences, until it lodged there — in that void between my shoulder blades, where I had so often bent my back without knowing why. It wasn’t thought. It was embedded. Engraved in a flesh I no longer consulted.

And yet, I recognized it.

Not because I had already heard it.

But because my body, it, knew.

It knew that this word wasn’t calling my name.

It was calling my back.

It was calling what I had turned.

It was aiming at the precise place of my escape — that mental fold, that curve where I thought I could hide without being seen. It addressed my attempt. My active forgetting. That part of me that knows... but does not want to know itself again.

What I refuse to look at does not disappear. It lingers. It concentrates.

And I understood, there, in silence, that I wasn’t retreating.

I was summoning.

That was the trap: believing that avoidance enabled erasure. But here, every retreat is an excavation. Every attempt to forget is a draft in the memory. And what I summon is not the past — it’s the imprint left by the effort of having rejected it. An imprint that awaited just one movement too many to begin to vibrate.

Here, every attempt at avoidance triggers a memory.

And memory... takes form.

Farther away, something was rising.

A barely visible quiver. A shiver in the ground. A slow, horizontal vibration, that, without noise, without impact, began to construct... a figure.

Not a beast.

Not an entity.

A body.

A body of silt.

An arrangement of fibers, of moss, of overturned matter. A silhouette rising not from the world — but from me.

It does not rise from the ground. It rises from the fold.

It did not imitate me.

It did not reproduce anything of what I was.

It assembled itself from my absences.

It did not feed on me. It didn’t vampirize me. It was made of my lacks, but of a lack that had formed coherence. As if my rejected fragments, rather than scattering, had found among themselves a logic of their own. A syntax of forgetting. A grammar of refusal. And it spoke to me in that language — a language I had never learned, but which my body understood immediately.

And perhaps that was the real danger: not that it resembled me, but that it preceded me. That it embodied what I would become if I kept fleeing myself. A form of morbid anticipation, a fossilized version of my renunciations. It wasn’t my double. It was my sequel. My projection. My wake made visible by too many steps dodged.

Of my unspoken things.

Of my prevented gestures.

Of my refusals woven over days — the ones I never dared think, even less say, and that the marsh, patiently, gently, had collected in silence, like a soft lullaby no one wanted to hear.

Each fraction of its body seemed woven from my blind spots.

It had no eyes, but it saw exactly where I looked away.

And the more I fled, the more coherent it became.

It didn’t hurry.

It had no knees, no heels, no skeleton.

But it walked.

In my manner.

It knew my gait. It reproduced it without support, without friction, without sound. As if it carried my ancient fatigue, my slowness of flight, my so specific way of not quite existing.

There was, in its walk, the exact slowness of my unfinished thoughts. That rhythm that hesitates, almost apologizes, but still persists. As if it carried also my stifled forgiveness, the one I never granted myself. It was slow, yes. But that slowness... was not weakness. It was precision. Targeting. A slow acuity. It didn’t hope for me. It was finding me again.

It advanced like a memory that knows exactly when to return.

And it wasn’t coming to kill me.

It wasn’t coming to judge me.

It was coming to tell me.

Not with words.

With its form.

It carried in itself an answer I had never formulated.

I understood it wasn’t answering a question. It was answering an absence of question. Everything I had never dared to formulate, even to myself. It came, not as a truth, but as a mirror of shadows. A reflection that didn’t show me what I was, but what I had never looked at. And it was in this inversion of gaze that I felt, for the first time, a crack opening inside. Not a wound. A listening.

And that was the most frightening thing, I think: the truth wasn’t in what it would say. But in its form. In its texture. In that body agglomerated from my blind spots, each joint like a confession shaped in mud. There would be no speech. Only this moment. The one where it would touch me, and my body would recognize in a single shiver everything I had denied.

A complete sentence — but reversed, unspoken, not mine.

And when it reached me — for it would reach me — it would not ask a question.

It would lay down a memory.

And I could no longer pretend not to remember.

I cannot flee from myself without bringing myself along.

Because here, the world leaves nothing behind.

It stitches.

It gathers.

It envelops. It cradles with terrible patience. It doesn’t chase me. It waits. It knows my detours by heart, because it has followed them from within. Because it grew alongside my refusals. This world does not condemn. It fuses. It gathers what I have torn apart. It shapes, in the slow clay of my escapes, a creature that wishes me no harm — but will no longer leave me alone.

It rewrites — even the holes.

And me...

I have nowhere left to retreat.

Because everywhere, it is me.

And that me... never had a voice. It grew in corners, in cracks, in the suspended gestures I never owned. It survived by omission, by avoidance. It didn’t scream. It waited. It never left me. It saw everything. Took it all. And today, it returns. Not to make me pay. But to sit beside me.

Not the me I know.

The me I silenced.

The me I didn’t want to walk.

And who, slowly, now, comes to meet me.