Anthesis of Sadness
Chapter 238: The One Who Walks Behind Me

Chapter 238: The One Who Walks Behind Me

I feel something.Not a hand.Not a breath.Not a scream.Something else.A presence without shape, without weight, without shadow. A density that doesn’t manifest but settles in, like a slow mist seeping into the nape of the neck, without shiver but with persistence.

At first, there is a barely perceptible suspension. Not an alert. Not a fear. A subtle shift in the density of the air. As if space, instead of resisting or welcoming, had begun to remember. A mute memory, undirected, unplaced. A crumpling in the fabric of the present. As if the world, without changing shape, had ceased to be neutral.

And that’s when I understand. I am no longer walking alone.

Not because a noise tells me so — here, nothing rustles. Not even my steps, not even my breaths, not even my hesitations. The swamp lets nothing through. It erases friction, it swallows rhythm. It doesn’t respond. It listens.

And yet... I feel.

Behind me. Not close. Not yet. But there. A cadence. A presence that doesn’t graze me, but replicates. A half-step delay. A mute breath at my back. Something that adjusts its walk to mine — with a troubling patience. As if it were waiting for me to stabilize so it could settle too. As if it didn’t want to go ahead, not yet. As if it had time.

It is not a being. I know it without knowing why. It is not a creature, not an autonomous consciousness. It is not a beast. It is a construction. A form that takes shape only because I leave hollows. Because I move away. Because each step I take contains an absence.

An absence... or perhaps a fracture. A fine line, painless, but open. As if every movement I made separated a little more of what I believe I am from what I leave behind. And in that gap, in that soft thin fracture between my heel and my will, something seeps in. Not a spirit. Not a force. A condensation. A liquid replica of myself, waiting.

An unspoken sentence. A fault. And that thing, behind, is only that: the trace made visible. The memory in formation. The void in the process of populating.

It is not a pursuit.

It is a graft.

And I understand, with a painful delay, that it has been there longer. Perhaps always. That it follows me not since this floor, but since the very inside of my renunciations. And that only now, here, in this swamp that makes the unspeakable audible, I can feel it.

Not with the ears.

With the skin.

With the shoulder blades, tense.

With the hollows behind my knees, contracting without reason.

With the marrow.

With the back of my tongue.

I don’t turn around. I cannot. I feel that if I do, if my eyes try to fix it, it will take form. Not a blurry silhouette, but a defined form. A form I will no longer be able to ignore. A form with my legs — but not my direction. My voice — but not my choices. My weight — but not my breath. A mismatch. An unsynchronized double. A reflection not in water, but in time.

So I keep going.

I force my feet to move forward.

But each step is longer. Not more stretched — thicker. As if time were densifying between my heels and my knees. As if my own rhythm had lost its axis, and walking was no longer an act, but a negotiation. It’s no longer about moving forward. It’s about convincing the world to let me lay down one more step. And sometimes, the answer is not yes.

And the ground... changes.

It no longer yields. It barely undulates. A suspended, warm matter, between skin and listening. A carpet of viscous, yet calm density. A membrane. It no longer swallows me. It accompanies me. It receives my step. And his as well.

The one who walks behind me.

Step by step.

Same rhythm.

Same glide.

But without weight.

Without friction.

He has no need for shadow. He has my hollows. He has my half-hesitations. He uses my silences to exist. He invents nothing. He repeats. He gives back to me, just a bit behind, what I abandoned without understanding. He doesn’t create. He preserves.

Without shadow.

Like an incomplete copy.

And yet... he becomes more real than me.

I slow down.

So does he.

But not at the same moment.

He anticipates. Or he corrects. Or he knows.

He adjusts ahead.

As if he knew my hesitations before they formed.

And it’s in that tiny mismatch — in that quarter of a second where he guesses what I’m going to do — that I understand.

He doesn’t follow me.

He precedes me.

He traces me. He deduces me. He follows my inverted geometry, like an equation being solved backwards. He already knows the result: my absence. And he unrolls the steps, slowly, with care, to bring me back to zero.

Not forward.

Backward.

He comes from what I left behind. From what I refused. He is made of what I fled. And he moves not to reach me, but to cover me. To close me back up. To close what I opened. To fill in the silence I left behind. To seal the exact space of my desertion.

And a tremor begins.

Not in the legs.

In the axis.

In the spine.

In the inside of the spine. Not the muscle. The marrow.

A shiver that doesn’t move, but accumulates, slowly, between the ribs, in the tendons, in the back of the throat. A density of invisible sweat.

And there... without me thinking it, without formulation... a sentence settles, like a nerve sliding:

— It’s not him.

It’s me.

Maybe that’s the real tipping point. The moment where it’s no longer me thinking what I feel — but him. The exact moment my body becomes his mouth. Where my tremblings become his verb. Where I no longer know if it’s my shiver that speaks... or his form that takes voice through me.

Not a thought.

A reflux.

An inner movement. A truth without syntax. A passive, but total recognition. As if my own body, what I let slump over the years, were slowly straightening. Not to return. To exist. To take its place again.

And I know.

If he ever touches me, there will be no scream. No conflict. No struggle.

There will be fusion.

And no more boundary.

And I will no longer know who walked.

Nor who I am now.

Nor who I refused to be.

I will no longer know where my refusal begins, and where my origin ends.

So I walk.

Again.

But faster.

And so does he.

But with the same softness. The same precision. The same intransigent calm.

He doesn’t speed up to catch me.

He lets the world do it.

And the world... helps him.

As if he had won a pact I didn’t know I had signed. As if the swamp itself, tired of my fleeing, had chosen to transfer him the rights of passage. I am no longer the host. I am the trace. He is the bearer. The world aligns with his frequency. With his constancy. Not with my fear.

The ground adapts to him. It absorbs my tension. It dilutes my accelerations. It smooths my attempts. It rebinds. It restores texture to what I had stretched too far.

And I... am too much.

An excess in my own trace.

A foreign body in my own steps.

And suddenly, without sound, a thought returns to me. A thought unthought. An intuitive wound, surfacing without cause:

— What if it was me... walking behind him?

What if, from the start, I was only the delay?

The offset?

The clumsy counterpoint of an ancient form I try to flee?

And what if I were only the limp projection of a forgotten being, a denser, truer, older me, who... is coming back?

...but I, who was tasked to rejoin him. To be reabsorbed. To become again what, perhaps, never ceased to exist without me. To be the very delay of my own origin, become form, become fear, become wandering breath in a body that no longer knows to whom it belongs.

And what if it’s not him... who’s coming to me...

...but me... who’s returning to him?

I no longer have an answer.

I no longer have a direction.

I keep walking.

But I’m no longer sure I’m in front.