CHAPTER 241: THE THRESHOLD OF MY VOICE

I don’t hear them. I don’t read them. They don’t reach me through the ear or the eye. But I feel them. Not like one feels a thought rising. No. Not that cognitive push, predictable, guided by a need for meaning. It’s something else. Older. More basal. Like sensing a fever in the tongue before the body even acknowledges it. A strange heat, persistent, not painful but intrusive, lodged in the back of the mouth, in the gums, beneath the palate, at the exact spot where the breath folds before becoming sound. And what’s pushing there, gently, without jolt but without pause, has nothing of a symptom. It’s a presence.

And this presence asks nothing of me. It doesn’t push, doesn’t devour, demands neither listening nor confession. It simply waits, like one waits for the sap to rise, like one waits for the weight of winter to leave the branches without even noticing. It is there, without threat, without gentleness, without intention. But its mere existence creates a tension. A space to be filled. An inverted promise: that one day, I will have to respond — not to a question, but to a quiver. To a trace. To a form already written into my fibers.

And this presence... knows me. Not like one knows someone. Not like a memory returning. But like a posture never left. A way of holding oneself without thinking. A tilt of the head, a palm closed too quickly, a shoulder slightly lower than the other. What pushes there — this word, this breath, this voice to come — does not emerge from the present. It comes from blind spots. From zones I’ve abandoned. From fragments of myself I’ve stopped questioning. From gestures worn by repetition, made invisible even to my own gaze. It comes from there. From what I’ve continued to be without seeing myself.

There’s no revelation in this emergence. Only an exposure. A turned surface. A mirror without reflection forcing me to guess what I’ve always carried without looking at it. Maybe that’s what true language is, in the end: not what we name, but what we’ve never stopped becoming without saying it.

And yet... it speaks. Or rather: it wants to speak. Not to reveal a secret. Not to expose a fault. But to say exactly what I’ve never been able to formulate. And that’s what breaks me more than any pain. It’s not the fear that it might say something horrible. It’s the terror that it might say something true. Just enough. Just what is needed. Just what I never had the courage to hear aloud.

I feel their shape. The words. Not their content. Their movement. Their arrangement. A muted cadence, an inner swaying, as if language had found its place without waiting for me. As if my mouth had become a shell, and meaning, already formed elsewhere, came to settle there from the inside, by capillarity, by silent recognition.

And the more I feel them assemble, the more I fall apart. It’s my very architecture that wavers. Not a thought, not a belief, but the soft matter linking my silences to my gestures, my unspoken things to my ways of sitting, of turning my eyes, of breathing out of time. I feel my mental joints slacken, my fuzzy attachments, my invisible scaffolding — all that I built to avoid having to speak — falter under the insistence of a speech that never needed me to exist.

As if my silence, once structural, were becoming brittle. As if every syllable prepared by a foreign memory were undermining the foundations of my muteness. I no longer keep quiet. I crack. And in every crack, there’s a word waiting. Not ready to come out. Ready to take root.

So I freeze. Not like one protects oneself. But like one avoids betraying. I hold my breath, I close my jaw, I swallow all pulses. Not to prevent a scream. But to guard the secret of what I’ve never known how to say. Because if I open now, if I let this trembling breath pass through, it won’t be me speaking. Not the me I know. It will be the other. The one from before. The one from elsewhere. The one from underneath. The one I covered with silence. The one I learned to ignore.

He doesn’t return. He doesn’t emerge. He never disappeared. He just stopped knocking. But today, he no longer knocks: he slips. He seeps. He blends into my tissues like an old fever that doesn’t kill but distorts, curves, blurs. I thought him extinguished, I thought I had a choice. But it’s not a voice returning. It’s a me I covered with walls.

And I feel, perhaps for the first time, that my teeth are no longer enough. That they are not a barrier. That they are worn bones, polished by waiting, unable to hold back what comes from deep within, what does not want to come out but to be said. It’s not a voice seeking air. It’s a memory seeking form.

A memory that does not quite belong to me, but can no longer belong to anyone else. It has settled like a discreet parasite, patient, almost kind. It doesn’t devour. It infiltrates. It bends to my breath. And the more I refuse it, the more it embraces my silences. It doesn’t want to exist through me. It wants me to exist through it.

And around me, the world waits. Not the creatures. Not a consciousness. The swamp itself. The matter. The sheets. The suspended membranes. The viscous breaths in the air. All those obscure tissues that do not look, but perceive. They do not listen. They suspend. As if already... they knew. As if they had heard what I’ve never said, and were waiting for me to decide. To confirm it. To surrender. To finally admit it.

And if I don’t, it won’t be out of resistance. It will be from exhaustion. From collapse. From that soft form of cowardice we sometimes mistake for the courage to keep silent. But here, even muteness becomes an admission. Even refusal takes shape. Even flight becomes posture. And everything looks at me without eyes, without form, but with that terrifying certainty: that I no longer have a blind spot.

And what suffocates me most is not their waiting — it’s their patience. Their lack of judgment. Their open texture. As if everything here had been prepared to receive the speech I’ve never been able to allow myself. As if the world itself wanted to hear it in my place. Not to free me. But to make silence impossible.

And that’s where panic changes form. It’s not silence I dread. It’s recognition. Because as soon as those words come out, as soon as they cross my lips, someone — or something — will know. And I will no longer be able to pretend. I will no longer be able to say I didn’t know. I will no longer be able to hide behind vagueness. I will no longer be able to flee into doubt. Because I will have become what I said.

And I... I don’t want to. I don’t want to validate that memory. I don’t want to become that word. I don’t want the world to pin me down through a confession. I want to remain fluid. I want to remain that thing that hesitates, that trembles, that keeps its lips closed not out of fear, but out of fidelity to the unspeakable.

Because hesitation, in the end, is what remains of my freedom. Not choice. Not silence. The in-between. That suspension that delays the irreversible. That suspended beat where I am neither child nor adult, neither author nor oblivion. As long as I haven’t spoken, I’m not fixed. As long as I haven’t said it, I’m not incarnated. I am still breath. Still doubt. Still possible.

Because if I speak... I fix. And if I fix... I lose the gap. But I already feel that won’t be enough. Because the words... no longer want me to speak them. They want to pass through me. Like an old, thick, prelinguistic rumor that has waited too long at the edge of the world. And now, it chooses me. It takes me as threshold. It names me host. It moves through me.

And this passage — I do not control it. It’s not possession. It’s not ecstasy. It’s a soft colonization, slow, polite. A way of reminding me that my body is not just a shelter. That it can become a place. A place of passage, of memory, of transmission. I am no longer a subject. I am a threshold. And something — maybe someone — is waiting for me to yield.

She knows me better than I do. She knows where my lips weaken, where my tongue yields, where my throat opens in secret. And what I don’t dare say... knocks. Not on my teeth. Not in my throat. But on the silence itself. And that silence... tightens. It no longer resists. It prepares.

And I remain there. One breath away from tipping. One breath away from becoming irreversible. And in that breath is everything I couldn’t carry. Everything I preferred to keep quiet. Everything I feared to embody. It’s no longer speech. It’s a birth. And I know, in that precise instant, that if it comes forth, I will never again be alone in my voice.