My jaw clenched so tightly that my teeth seed to sink into each other, locked in a bestial, archaic reflex, as if simply opening my mouth could trigger an internal landslide, make a lava of mories erupt that I would never be able to contain again.
My tongue, heavy and rough, slid against the roof of my mouth like a rusty tool, refusing to form the words, and yet... they ca out, despite , despite everything, a hoarse, scraped groan, oozing more pain than anger — a barely human sound, strangled between the nerves, forced through the throat like one pulls out a poorly driven nail:
— Shut up...
But she, of course, did not.
She continued. Softly. With that precise slowness that belongs only to those who know they don’t need to push, don’t need to convince, don’t need to insist — because they speak truly. Because they say what already exists.
And her voice, though so soft, so faint, was a blade. A blade-caress. An infected tenderness. A whisper that cut:
— You cried... even when no one was watching.
I closed my eyes. Not to flee. Not to erase. Just to try to contain this tide, this truth that threatened to spread everywhere, into every vein, every heartbeat, every fiber, like a warm and black oil.
I squeezed my eyelids shut until I saw white bursts, spasms of light behind the darkness — as if I could blind myself, extinguish myself willingly, just enough to make it stop.
— You don’t exist. Go away.
The words snapped, dry, unreal, disconnected from my heart, as if I borrowed them from soone other than myself, from a mask forged in the urgency of survival.
And the silence that followed... was not empty. It was not a hollow silence, not a respite. It was an inhabited silence. Charged. A silence that weighed on my shoulders like a damp blanket on a poorly closed wound, a sheet slowly pulled over the corpse of sothing I still refused to na.
Then, her voice returned, like a breath sliding under the skin, not louder, no, not more assertive, but closer, so close it now seed to resonate inside , nestled in my ribs, pressed against my spine, stuck to my belly, as if it was no longer an external whisper but an intimate remanence, an internal replica of an echo too old to disappear:
— If I don’t exist... then why have I always been there, every ti you fell? Every ti you needed ?
My fists clenched sharply, almost involuntarily, in a spasm of absolute refusal, as if the only way not to hear her, not to let her in, was to dig my nails into my flesh, perhaps until blood, until the pain beca stronger than the sha, than the mory, than the love.
I didn’t want to answer. I didn’t want to think. I didn’t want any more of this conversation that wasn’t one, of this exposure without a witness, of this tenderness disguised as truth.
— I don’t know...
But it was too late. The words were out. And with them, a crack. A crack where poured out the anger, the bitterness, that rage of an abandoned child I thought dead but which had only been crawling in the shadows waiting for its mont.
— But all this is your fault!
My voice rose, rasped, ignited. A dry, raw, desperate fire, not cast to convince but to survive what was collapsing inside .
— ALL THIS! IT’S YOU WHO CAUSED IT! YOU!!!
And the world, then, closed again.
Slowly.
Silently.
Like a mouth that closes after having spoken too much.
Like a light that understands it is no longer welco.
Like a mother who lowers her eyes without ceasing to love.
The laughter resud — not in the background, not like those blurry remnants that can be brushed away with a shiver or a wavering will, no, they were there, fully, powerfully, all around , embedded in the very air, in every vibration of space, like a second skin clinging to mine, more real even than the pain.
They didn’t co from afar, not from the past, not from a mory one can file away, close or betray: they were there, in the mont, wrapped around my neck like broken childhood necklaces, slipped into my rib cage like remnants of poorly healed breath, imprinted under my closed eyelids with such brutal clarity that I felt I could see them, despite the darkness, like flashes of old joy tattooed in the shadow.
And they beca stronger.
Clearer, sharper, more unbearable, bearing a purity I no longer deserved, an innocence I had trampled, massacred, burned alive with every choice, every scream, every defeat.
They were faceless children’s laughter, echoes too sharp, too clear to still belong to this world.
And I knew it, I felt it in my bones: those voices were mine.
Forgotten versions of myself, fragnts of consciousness lost in the corridors of sha, twisted echoes of what I had been before the world opened up.
So I clenched my teeth, hard, very hard, to the point of feeling my molars grind, slide, resist, as if my whole jaw beca a cage of anger ready to burst under the pressure.
I clenched my fists again, with that silent spite, that screamless rage, just enough for my nails to tear the skin, for the blood to bead, red and warm, in the hollow of my already damaged palms, like a useless offering to a god too tender.
And I bit the inside of my cheek. Hard. Brutally. Enough to feel the flesh give way under the tooth, for the taste of iron to rise to my tongue, for the tallic acidity to erase, if only for a fleeting mont, the sweet and rancid taste of that unbearable mory.
It was no longer pain. It was a refusal. An organic, total refusal, scread by every nerve, every muscle, every beat of my deford heart.
And then, it rose. It rose from the guts, from the marrow, from a pain too old to still bear a na.
It rose like a black geyser, like a scream I had repressed since the beginning, like a tear finally too wide to be contained.
And I scread.
Not an articulated cry, not a word, not a plea — a raw, formless, exploded, saturated scream, no longer resembling a voice but an implosion of soul, a moan torn by the wind, a storm vomited from the entrails of a being who no longer knows how to exist without breaking.
It was a breath of world’s end, a scream made to split bones, make islands vibrate, burn the air, tear the soft and sticky matrix of this nightmare — a scream thrown at the world, at the voices, at the light, at that infected tenderness that refused to hate .
A scream to order them to shut up, to close their child mouths, to finally extinguish like I could not.
A scream against everything I had been. A scream against .
My voice exploded into the grass like one tears living fabric, not into the sky, not through the air, but into the very matter of this world, into its soft flesh, into its sugary fibers, like a sound blade torn from the depths of my guts, raw, bare, unforgivable, that sought neither to convince nor to plead — just to hurt.
It did not echo. It did not bounce back like an echo. It spread.
A wave. A tide. An impact that had nothing acoustic, nothing symbolic. A pure, wild, primal vibration.
And then, the grass — that field sick with persistent tenderness — shuddered.
Not gently. Not timidly.
It quivered like a body seized with spasms.
Each blade twisted all at once, as if it had felt the pain, as if it had taken it in too, as if this scream had struck a giant exposed nerve buried beneath the ground, and the entire plain was a gigantic nervous system.
The blades stirred in spirals. They undulated. They straightened. They bowed. They vibrated around in a soft, rhythmic, pulsing chaos, like an animal breath suddenly forced to pant.
And the whole plain vibrated.
Not a dry tremor. Not a jolt of panic.
No. A breath. A slow, deep, almost uterine beat, that rose from the roots of the world to spread around like a response — not violent, not vengeful, but wounded.
As if this world, in its stubborn softness, had received my scream not as a threat... but as a sob.
Like the breath of a child who breaks a toy he still loves.
Then the laughter... that laughter too clear, too alive, too old to belong to the present, cracked.
Not like one goes out, not like one dies, but like one gives in.
Like glass under too much tension, like an old cassette tired by ti, left in the sun until its tape begins to warp, to moan, to bend under the heat of a mory too heavy.
They did not fall silent. They broke.
Into shards. Into pieces. Into unfinished creaks. Into sudden silences, cut off sharply, like children’s screams suspended in a throat that no longer wants to speak.
Into absurd, dissonant crackles, almost comical — almost.
Then nothing was clear anymore. They diffracted into the air, drowned in an invisible weave, a web of sounds torn from the mory of a too ancient to still know where it began.
But they did not disappear. No.
It was not a flight. Not an abandonnt.
They withdrew. Slightly.
Like a ntal tide that recedes without ever truly leaving the shore, like a presence lurking in the walls that stops talking but continues to listen.
They pressed down, yes, into the folds of the world, into its veins, into its roots.
They slid slowly under the surface — not to flee, not to erase, but to burrow better, to watch better from below, like childhood worms lodged in the nerves of the soil, like shadows of myself that beca roots never to be forgotten.
They were not leaving.
They were sinking.
And the more they withdrew — not in silence, but in depth — the more I felt their weight change.
They were no longer those volatile shards of a childish past, those crystalline laughs with accents of mory.
No. Their density thickened. Their nature twisted.
They beca heavy, saturated with a graver, more adult, almost inquisitive presence.
Less playful, less innocent.
They lost their joy, or maybe they were covering it, like one gags a too-curious child.
A new gravity flowed from them, slow, heavy, foreign to the lightness that had carried them.
And yet, they did not threaten .
Not literally.
There were no attacks, no claws, no talons.
There was a gaze.
Yes, that was it.
A gaze without pupil, without eyelid, without shape, but as palpable as a finger on my neck, as piercing as the breath of a being who knows you too well.
An ancient gaze.
An inner gaze.
I felt it brushing from the inside, as if it had been born in my own mory, as if it had ford in my first falls, my first doubts, my first betrayals.
And it was evaluating . I knew it. It was gauging . It was peeling without flaying , looking for a trace, a print, a remnant that even I no longer dared to hope for.
Was it a crack they were hunting? A fissure in my armor, a cry smothered beneath my teeth?
Or worse — a still-living ounce of innocence, a fragnt of tenderness I had not managed to burn?
I didn’t know.
And in that silence beco vibrant again, that silence full of quivering blades, of nervous ground, of sighs hidden in the stems, sothing shifted.
A doubt invaded , not brutally, but like a slow poison.
And what if it wasn’t them who were watching ... but ?
, looking through them.
, judging what I had beco, unable to distinguish the target of the gaze.
, leaning over myself, searching for a culprit in a world that, for the first ti, was not pointing a finger at .
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