The passage thinned little by little, retracting beneath my steps like a thread unwinding in reverse, and I suddenly felt the strange sensation that the world, in a discreet yet implacable whim, was deciding to no longer offer ground, as if moving forward had beco a fault, a gesture too many, an insistence that space itself now refused to welco.
As if, this ti, it was the world imposing the stop. Not out of cruelty, but out of saturation. As if it could no longer absorb what I was becoming.
The material changed beneath my steps, becoming finer, more elongated, almost woven — no longer a stable ground, but a succession of living, organic cables, like stretched nerves or exposed veins, knotted between two arches suspended in the void, barely swayed by a breath I could not feel, as if I were walking on a narrow thread stretched between two breaths of the world, between two hesitations of the air itself.
I stopped, without abruptness, without any apparent reason, as if sothing in — older than will, more instinctive than fear — had placed a weight in my heels, a silent restraint in my breath, inviting to suspend movent, to let silence beco whole again.
In front of stretched what could have been called a bridge — but the word rang false, too simple, too human, like an attempt to dosticate the unknown with a familiar term. It was not a path, not a crossing offered. It was a condition. A requirent set by the world itself, stretched like a living equation that my steps would have to solve with no promise of outco. And perhaps not even the possibility of error. Because here, there was no fall. Only dissolution. The slow loss of a support that had never truly been given.
Each fiber vibrated, almost imperceptibly, with a discreet yet continuous tension, as if sothing profoundly alive throbbed inside their very texture — not a breath, not an echo, but a kind of diffuse alert, transmitted from one nerve to another through shivers of algae or tendon. It wasn’t the wind, for here the air remained still, thick, saturated with a clammy expectation that nothing ca to pierce. That tremor responded to sothing else. A vaster force. A duller one.
Sothing invisible, but ancient. A tectonic shift of silence. An inner tide not ant to topple , but to absorb .
Each thread — suspended vein, corded fiber, almost animal — seed to react to a hidden gravity, as if the weight of the world itself, that ancient, millennia-old weight, the one you no longer feel because it is everywhere, was depositing itself drop by drop into each fiber to inform it, to contract it, to warn it that sothing, sowhere, was about to tip over.
And ... it was on that that I had to move forward — on this vibrating weave, woven of nerves or artificial ligants, on this suspended network that was neither path nor floor, but sothing in between, ambiguous, a living interlace too tense to inspire trust, too supple to be ignored, as if I were setting my feet on a sleeping body I had no right to wake.
Each step felt like a caress given too strongly, a breath out of place, an intrusion so soft that it beca all the more violent.
Each step beca an intrusion. An almost intimate fault. And yet, I had no other choice.
I placed a foot, cautiously, almost reluctantly, and the fiber reacted instantly — it tensed beneath with a supple, almost animal tension, like a living rope evaluating . Then, in a second movent, it retracted slightly, not to withdraw, but to adjust, as if it were trying to understand what I was, what I was carrying.
It held , yes, but I felt it did so only on a fragile, precarious, implicit condition: that I not be too heavy. Not in my body. Not in my thoughts. Because very quickly, I understood — or rather, I sensed it, in the micro-movents of the material beneath my feet, in the trembling of its fibers tensed like tendons beneath a giant’s skin — every thought too dense, every mory too laden, every fear too tight added more weight. And that weight, it felt. It asured. It judged.
It vibrated, yes, but with an inner vibration, contained, almost nervous, like a muscle under too much strain. It didn’t sing, didn’t really rustle — it creaked, gently, not with sound but with resistance, as if its very texture refused what it supported, as if it struggled to welco what I represented.
And if, by reflex, I tensed — if my breath blocked, if an involuntary fear crossed the threshold of my nape — then it twisted, subtly, violently, like a beast under the skin, a living nerve expressing its refusal without a cry, but with the implicit promise that nothing would hold if I continued that way.
I had to let go. Slowly. Completely. Not of any visible weight, but of everything I carried without seeing it — the na, first, that old na grown too heavy for a single syllable; then the past, its broken edges, its remnants clinging to my bones like scraps no one wanted to tear away for ; and the screams too, especially those, the screams I could no longer utter, trapped sowhere between my clenched teeth and the soft hollows of my chest, smothered for far too long.
That deford . That made this unbalanced body, too full, too compressed, incapable of expelling what wanted to co out without words.
I had to let go of everything. I had to reduce myself to the essential. To balance. To beco only that: a breath. A step. Another breath. Another step. As if the universe only agreed to carry on the condition that I ceased to be soone, to beco only a fragile rhythm, a bare pulse, offered to the thread.
And behind ... she still followed. Silent, steady, unchanged. The thing detached from the wall, that naless excrescence, without apparent function, but stubbornly present, floated a few steps away, as if suspended to a logic that eluded . She didn’t lag. She didn’t slow down. She didn’t draw any closer. She persisted, simply, in that precise distance, as if the invisible link between us — born of silence, nourished by emptiness — was enough to guide her.
And even without sound, even without contact, I felt her presence weigh, not on my nape, but sowhere deeper, in that murky zone where instinct senses what reason dares not look at.
She didn’t touch the fibers. Not really. She didn’t make them vibrate like I did, didn’t tense them, didn’t make them creak beneath her passage. She slid between them, like a conscious mist, an absence shaped into the form of a presence, and each separation of thread seed to welco her without resistance, without distrust, as if the world itself recognized her.
As if she weighed nothing. Or rather: as if she carried nothing. No na. No story. No conflict.
She had no mory, no weight. She had no origin to defend, no story to justify. And that absence, that quiet void, weighed heavier than any armor.
And I wasn’t jealous — no, not quite — but I was increasingly sure, in that slow suspended walk, that her nature was not foreign to mine. That she was made, not of what I had said, nor even of what I had fled... but of what I had known to keep silent.
That silence. The one no one had asked for, but that I had offered anyway, by instinct or by sha. She was its residue. The condensed echo.
But I... I still carried. Everything I hadn’t yet managed to set down. Everything I hadn’t been able to abandon along the way: the shapeless remains of the past, the nas stifled in my throat, the invisible weights lodged in the hollow of my gestures. They were there, clinging to like ntal suction cups, mories folded beneath the skin, and I dragged them without sound, without complaint, but not without effect.
So I kept going. Without defiance, without heroism. Just like that. A breath. A step. And a forgetting.
Or rather: an attempt at forgetting. As if each inhalation allowed to release a fragnt, to relegate a na to the edge of oblivion without quite letting it go.
And the fiber... held. It bent, yes, it wavered under my mixed weight, but it held.
Because I was starting to give in. too.
Not because it accepted . But because I was no longer quite there. A part of had stopped walking.
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