I first believed that my feet had simply sunk. That the ground, spongy, treacherous, had given way all at once beneath the moist weight of my slow walk, as if the floor itself, tired of carrying , decided to beco muddy, to offer my steps a soft bed, permissive, almost affectionate, to swallow gently. But it was not a fall. It was not a collapse. There was no brutal slide, no tipping. It was slower. More intimate. A sinking. Progressive. Patient. A long, almost tender gesture from sothing lurking just beneath the surface, which did not wait for to fall, but to yield — and which, without violence, without sound, without biting or strangling, had closed its invisible lips around my ankles, not to punish , but simply... to hold .
As if my feet were the only things still confident enough to believe they were outside of , and the world, tired of waiting for fully, had decided to start with them.
I saw no edge. No bank. No clear line. The world was no longer made of contours. There was only this matter. This sweet, viscous, warm density. A ground without ground. A flesh without limit.
Every molecule seed to hesitate between rejecting or welcoming , as if matter itself did not yet know whether I was an intruder or an offering.
It did not push away. It did not capture . It absorbed . With a slowness that was not sadistic, but ancient. Inexorable. And that was what scared — not the loss of mobility, no, but this welcoming silence, this moisture without conflict, this way the world had of incorporating as if I had always been part of its density, as if my form were just a temporary detail it was ti to dissolve.
I tried to lift a leg, just one. A test. A surge of will. But the matter responded. Not by opposition. By attachnt. It stretched with , without yielding, as if it refused to break the bond.
There was no struggle. Just a strange, tenacious fidelity, which wanted to continue being part of even when I tried to leave.
The resistance was not muscular. It was affective. A sticky fidelity. And when my skin finally erged, slowly, from that soft embrace, it was black, shiny, oozing, covered with a liquid without odor, but at the exact temperature of my own blood — which made shiver more deeply than any burn.
I remained there, suspended in a semi-step, between the desire to disengage and the obscure intuition that moving too fast would provoke sothing.
I felt, under my skin, zones vibrating at a rhythm I didn’t recognize. As if a part of was slowly tuning to a foreign mory.
My body was no longer entirely mine. It floated in between, half lted, half swallowed, and sothing — yes, sothing — pulsed beneath . A weak but regular rhythm. It wasn’t my heart. It wasn’t my breath. It was sothing else. A slow, diffuse, foreign breath, but synchronized with my own tempo.
Not re imitation. A real breath. But inverted. It was who was becoming the lung.
As if the ground... breathed through .
And that’s when I understood.
It wasn’t who maintained the contact.
It was it that held .
Not to prevent from advancing. Not to devour . Not even to possess . It did not crush . It read . It perceived. It deciphered. Each gesture — each micro-movent I tried to extract myself — produced a long, horizontal shiver, a trembling in the matter that receded in waves, like a digestive signal, like a decoding breath. The marsh did not chain . It interpreted my hesitations.
So I stopped moving.
Not to negotiate. Not to preserve myself. Instinctively. With troubled lucidity. Because I had understood — without understanding — that every resistance awakened sothing. Sothing asleep. A need. And I had no desire to know what this world might desire.
I slowly lowered my arms. My thoughts, too, had tense — despite — in the silence.
But thoughts no longer had shelter. They poured through my head like sand in an open hand — visible, vulnerable, exposed to this eyelidless listening.
I tried to divert them. To dissolve them. But here... even thinking made vibrations.
And then...
a voice erged.
Not in the air.
In my head.
But skewed. Foreign.
Or maybe not.
My voice, perhaps, but older. More weary.
One of those sentences thought too strongly, one day, and never dared aloud. A sentence I never formulated but that, since then, never quite silenced—
— I am tired of being read.
A sentence I didn’t even know I had in . Like ntal dust clumped over years, forming a murmur by re saturation.
The ground reacted.
Subtly.
Not with spasm. Not with rejection.
A slow undulation. Like a nervous shiver traveling through a body without nerves. A profound, painful, mute listening.
And there... I understood.
That floor was not a trial.
It was not a test to pass. It asked nothing of : no climb, no victory, no passage. It had no threshold to offer.
It did not seek to test . It wanted to inhabit , gently, as one waits for a room to resonate with a song it would recognize.
It wanted... to stay. It wanted to speak. Not loudly. Internally. It wanted to tell my story. To dissolve into the murmur of my own unsaid words. It did not want my strength. It wanted... my frawork.
But I had no frawork left.
Only an entanglent of residues. Of refusals. Of silences.
So I did what I had long forgotten how to do: I resud walking. Not to get out. Not to defy. But as one extricates oneself from a clammy dream. Slowly. Without seeking to break. Without seeking to flee. Only... to not collapse. To not fully belong.
And that’s when I saw it.
The first one.
A presence I had not sought, but that, as soon as it appeared, made realize how alone I had remained until then — alone in absorption, alone in listening.
I don’t know what it was. A being? A plant? A mory standing upright?
At first, I thought it was a dead trunk. Twisted. Stripped of all bark. Standing there, like an organic ruin, a few ters away. But very quickly... I saw it was breathing. Slowly. Barely. With that infinitesimal cadence only alive beings without fear possess.
Its fibers pulsed. Not like veins. But like muscles without bones. A living mass without apparent will, but not without presence. And at the end of this form, there was sothing open. Not a mouth. Not an eye. A living, damp slit, from which erged a thin filant, floating in the air with the sinister grace of roots searching for their soil.
It did not look at .
It did not retreat.
It judged nothing.
It lived. There. In that marsh. With the unbearable slowness of those who have renounced all urgency.
And I, I walked.
Not to move forward.
To not stay.
To not be seen too long.
To not answer.
As if leaving was not movent, but betrayal. As if distancing myself without speaking, without offering, without opening... was a failure of a promise I had nonetheless never made.
But with each step...
the marsh, it, held .
Not by force.
By listening.
And I grew more and more afraid — that it might one day be , who would have to answer.
And that I would have... nothing left to say, except what I never wanted to say.
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