Anthesis of Sadness Chapter 221: The Remaining Sentence

I stayed facing her.

Or rather: facing myself.

Because that form frozen in the wall — that reflection without reflection, that silhouette embedded in a matter too alive to be inert, too mute to be empty — kept mimicking what I was, but with a cruel shift.

A shift that didn’t say: "you are late." But: "you are fleeing."

She didn’t repeat my gestures. No. She didn’t imitate what I was doing. She replayed what I was holding back. Every silenced hesitation, every restrained emotion, every interrupted breath — she embodied them. She carried them in my place. She made them visible.

That... tore apart. Because she showed what I refused to admit: that my body was lying, but she, she was telling the truth.

So I tried.

Not to speak — I already knew the words would slip without reaching, that they would only brush the surface without ever cracking what needed to be.

I didn’t try to move either, nor to flee, nor even to understand.

I tried... to think differently.

Not in the sense of changing my mind, or inventing a way out. But in the sense of inhabiting the inside differently. Of moving within myself. Of stopping fighting against what was surfacing, and trying — just trying — to no longer censor, no longer sort, no longer classify. To let rise what I was used to swallowing. To accept that certain thoughts, certain images, certain sensations could exist without having to be corrected or pushed away. I tried to release the inner jaw. To lower the weapons of judgnt. Just a little.

In that suspension, in that breath torn from control, I understood what I hadn’t known how to do for a long ti: welco a sensation without dissecting it.

And in that effort, tiny but burning, I realized how foreign it had beco to ... simply to be with myself.

The wall didn’t move.

It didn’t vibrate, didn’t deform, didn’t push away either.It was waiting.

Motionless. Impassive. Almost absent.

Not a sound filtered through. Not an emotion emanated from it. It emitted nothing. But sothing, in its mute density, in that compact silence that seed to envelop from the inside, carried a demand. Not a pain. Not a mory. A sentence.A single one.

I understood it suddenly — not as an idea, but as a brutal truth, dropped into my stomach like a stone in stagnant water. That wall didn’t want to cross it by force. It was waiting for to speak. At last.

She, the wall-figure, that living imprint frozen on the surface, kept forming words. Always the sa. Always in the sa order. Tirelessly. Like a silent chanism rooted in my mory. As if she were reciting sothing I had never known how to hear but that I nonetheless recognized. A sentence written elsewhere. In , perhaps. Or in the very fabric of the floor. And a shiver ran through — slow, vertical, deep, not born from fear but from the sudden, painful recognition of a truth I hadn’t yet accepted... but which was already there, repeated aloud by that mouth that had never needed sound.

A truth that didn’t scream. It whispered endlessly, until I was naked enough to hear.

I recognized them.

Those words she was tirelessly forming, I had already said them. One day. I no longer knew when, or to whom, or even in which body I was at that mont. But they had co out of . They had existed in my mouth. Spoken without attention, without weight, without awareness. Let loose like one says what one believes to be true to escape what truly is. I had said them, yes — but without listening to what I was saying. And now... they were coming back to , carved on that living wall, repeated without hatred, without irony, just there, present, insistent, as if to force to hear what I myself had refused to hear when it was still possible.

It was old.

Very old.

Perhaps in childhood, at a blurry, misty mont, never fully nad. Perhaps in the chasm, that contourless place where thoughts retract. Perhaps even here, earlier, without my realizing it, between two floors, between two silences, between two fears. I no longer knew. But I had said them. Those words. And they had stayed. Invisible but alive. They had clung to like supple, creeping thorns, which I refused to feel but which had continued to grow in my folds, quietly, stubbornly, until they finally found the right wall to bloom again. Now.

And now...

I had to say them again.

But not like before.

Not like a polite excuse whispered to soothe the mont. Not like a hollow reflex, inherited from survival habits. Not like a defense thrown on too quickly to mask the crack. No. This ti, I had to say them differently.

I had to pronounce them with all the weight they contained. Their original density. Their rough truth.

Everything I had never dared to carry. Everything I had sidestepped, minimized, covered with silence or diverted gestures. I had to give them back their mass. Their grounding. Their intact emotional charge.

Say them, fully. And let them pass through . At last.

Not so they could deliver . But so that, in their passing, they would leave whole.

So I took a breath. Slow. Trembling. As if my lungs hesitated to welco that breath, as if even the air knew it would carry sothing other than a simple word.

And I murmured, within — not aloud, not yet, but just loud enough for the inner world to hear:

— I don’t care. It doesn’t matter.

Three words. Nothing more.

And yet... two refusals. A retreat. A cowardice disguised as detachnt. A clumsy attempt to defuse what was burning without extinguishing it. A sentence I had said a hundred tis without hearing it, and which, here, weighed like a gentle condemnation.

Because I now knew what it contained: the abandonnt before the pain. The denial before the fear. And this ti... it would not pass.

I had once thrown them like stones.

Without thinking. Without weighing them. Just to strike, to cut short, to silence what threatened to erge.

I had thrown them on myself, first — to silence myself faster, to make myself shut up. Not to cry. Not to feel. Then on others too, not always intentionally, but with the sa inner chanism: that of rejection, instinctive defense, that way I had learned too early to turn pain into weapon, cracks into projectiles.

And now... I was saying them while hearing them for the first ti.

Not with my ears, but with what was left alive under the layers, under the silences, under the defensive folds I had cultivated so much.

I was saying them... and I was receiving them.

That reception... wasn’t gentle. It tore sothing out. But what it left in vibrated.

And the form in the wall — the one who had carried my unsaids, who had mid my tensions, repeated my denials — looked at . Slowly. Without insistence.

And she smiled.

No mockery in that smile. No irony. Not even a hint of victory.

It was a smile of release. Of peaceful surrender. As if she too, finally, was relieved. As if my confession had freed her just as much as it had freed , and that she had never wanted anything else but that mont — not to disappear, but to be able to stop waiting.

Then, without a sound, the wall beca fluid.

Its surface, once frozen like a mute mirror, began to ripple gently, with the weary slowness of things that have waited too long. It looked like a tired mbrane, worn out by ti, by reflections, by successive refusals — a living skin that no one had ever dared to cross, not out of fear of the passage, but out of fear of what it would release.

I reached out. And it didn’t push it away. It opened. Or rather: it stopped resisting.

As if it had been made for that precise mont, neither before nor after.

Then I passed through.

Not like one walks through a door, but like one slips through oneself. Like crossing a threshold one had carried inside forever, unknowingly.

And the sentence, it, remained suspended behind .

Like an unclaid breath. Like an echo clinging to space, to matter, to silence itself. It didn’t disappear. It didn’t dissolve. It remained there, suspended in the air, in the wall, in that threshold turned mory.

But this ti... I knew what it contained. I knew its weight.

Its pain.

Its truth.

And above all — I knew I could no longer pretend not to know.