CHAPTER 242: WHAT MY MOUTH HAS KEPT

I didn’t want it.

I didn’t decide it. I didn’t call. I didn’t open my mouth. Even my lips remained closed, tense in an inertia without prayer, without invitation, as if my whole body, from the belly to the teeth, knew that any movement would already be too much.

And yet... it came out.

And in that "it came out," there was already a crack. Because nothing comes out of a body without first carving a path. There had been a preparation, perhaps ancient, perhaps even foreign to my own story — a long, silent work of shaping, a mineral waiting, as if my flesh had been slowly molded for this sole purpose: to one day emit what would never belong to me.

Just before the sound existed, I felt a beat. A beat that wasn’t mine. Something older, slower, like a displaced heart, lodged somewhere in the throat. Not a heartbeat. A different kind of pulse. A surge from before language, before breath. As if my flesh had welcomed a dormant form that remembered the exact path to expression. And that now was awakening.

Not a scream. Not a call. Not even a moan.

Something rose up.

A sentence. Or something like one. A sound-shape, rising on its own, without permission, without violence, without voluntary breath. A string of sounds that didn’t try to be said, but to exist through me, like an old sigh returning without warning, like a memory of air, lodged so deep it no longer passed through consciousness.

And that sentence... already knew the way.

It didn’t pass through me. It slid. Without scraping, without bumping. Between the teeth. Against the palate. Into the precise hollow of the throat. It forced nothing. It pushed nothing. It embraced. It glided into what I was, as if it had always been folded there, tucked away, ready.

It slid like an ancient oil into a conduit long forgotten. There was something damp, almost intimate, in the way it slipped in. A reversed modesty. It wasn’t the sentence that was naked — it was me. And it touched me, from the inside, like one caresses a body long asleep, redrawing its boundaries from within.

It wasn’t loud.

It wasn’t clear.

But it was there.

And I felt it pass.

Not like a word you speak. Like a body exhaling. A temperature. A rhythm. An inner texture. As if my mouth became a place of emission — not an actor, a passage.

And in my throat, I felt it settle. Not like a voice. Like a warm viscosity, lodged between the muscle fibers, caressing the walls, unfolding its syllables like limbs. It wasn’t foreign. It had been strangled. For a long time. It sought to breathe through me. Not to speak, but to exist again, in an imprinted breath, a panting memory.

There was a moment — tiny, but clear — when I felt resistance. Not rejection, not fear. A hesitation of the flesh. As if my throat, long kept virgin of foreign memory, suddenly had to yield its place to another articulation of the world. And it did. Not out of submission, but out of recovered memory.

And in that passage, nothing meaningful. Nothing evident. Just a gentle, strange arrangement, like a lost lullaby, formed without me, but in me. A forgotten language of which only the music remained.

And I didn’t stop anything.

Because I didn’t understand.

And in that soft lack of understanding, I let it happen. Not out of surrender. Out of lack of tools. Out of inability to intervene. I wasn’t absent. But I was no longer the emitter.

And now... my tongue carries a memory.

Not a mental memory. A flesh memory. A memory of tension and release, of moisture, of pressure, of sliding against the teeth. A memory of usage, of habit, of instinct. As if my tongue had been shaped elsewhere, in another mouth, for another speech. And now, this muscle betrays me out of loyalty to someone else.

A memory lodged in the muscle. In the way it rolls under the palate. In how it hugs the back teeth. In how it retracts at certain sounds as if it had formed them a thousand times before.

A memory of articulation.

A memory of another.

And that memory still speaks.

Not through me.

Through me.

It uses my folds. My saliva. My tension. My jaw. Every syllable is a borrowed shape, a sonic imprint left by a past I did not live — but that my body recognizes without having known.

There is a form of sadness in my tissues. A soft complaint, lodged in the fibers, that doesn’t name itself but resonates in every involuntary gesture. As if my palate, my jaw, my whole throat already knew what had been lost — and welcomed its return not as an invasion, but as a debt to be paid. The body remembers, even when the soul looks away.

Each deposited sound left a mark. Not an acoustic mark, but a warm imprint, organic, almost tactile, as if my tongue had been scarred from the inside by a speech it never formed. I still felt, in my teeth, the passage of syllables, like tiny invisible burns. And in my saliva, a metallic taste, old — not of blood, but of rust. As if something had reopened.

And in every word... there is a warmth.

Not the warmth of fever. A warmth of loss. Something liquid, tepid, already wept. A fluid sadness, placed there without insistence, but with the dull intensity of things that have waited too long.

What it says... is not a truth.

It’s a formulated loss.

A loss it lays down. Like giving back something kept too long. Not stolen. Kept. And now too heavy to carry.

I still don’t understand what I’m saying.

But I understand that what I’m saying... surpasses me.

And that surpassing wasn’t grand. It wasn’t mystical. It wasn’t a calling or a revelation. It felt more like a very old fatigue — the fatigue of a child who had to speak too soon, or that of a body remembering having once spoken, but in another life, in another mouth, for a cause that has vanished.

And the world, it... listens.

All around, matter breathes differently. The swamp is no longer a place. It is an organ. A porous skin. An open mouth. The air has thickened like a liquid, and every plant, every limp mass, every suspended pulse seems to contain a hidden eardrum. It’s not silence. It’s saturated listening. Absorption. An eyeless waiting, yet full. The world has begun drinking my words.

The swamp has stopped pulsing. It no longer trembles. It no longer reacts.

It gathers.

That silence wasn’t empty. It had density. A nearly liquid weight. The kind of silence that doesn’t absorb, but caresses the word until it dissolves. And I understood that the world around me was not passive. It remembered. It recognized the patterns. It gathered the remains.

Not frozen. Welcoming.

Like a belly that listens. Like a bed of warm water that drinks without noise. Like a tender space that lets itself be imprinted by breath.

This place is not a backdrop. It is a living archive. A matrix designed to receive words without a host, orphaned songs, fragments of language without people. It has no edge or center. It has a function. It is made to listen to what can no longer be heard elsewhere. To serve as a grave for sounds too old, too soft, too sad to survive the din.

It wasn’t built. It was formed. Not by hands, but by absences. By the repeated erasure of voices too gentle, by the slow disappearance of peoples who never had a verbal grave. This swamp wasn’t created: it survived. And in its mud, it kept what other places rejected.

And I feel that these words — these half-words, these extinguished cadences, these imperfect murmurs — are awaited.

Not by someone.

By the place itself.

By the matter.

By this organic soil, this suspended fabric, this edgeless swamp made to absorb what no one wants to keep.

And suddenly, a noise. Very soft. Very distant.

A breath.

Not an echo.

A reversed breath.

A response — not for me.

But for what I said.

As if, somewhere in this world, something was listening to me from behind. As if an entity, a body, a waiting silhouette... had finally heard me.

Not me.

Him.

The one who follows me.

The one who had been walking for several phrases.

The one who remembered.

The one it belonged to.

He doesn’t move my gestures. He watches them. He doesn’t speak. He waits for my mouth to adjust to his words. As if he were testing the muscle memory, the compatibility of my flesh with his silence. And this test... is ongoing. I feel, under my tongue, a strange impatience — not a will, a nervous memory. As if he too were afraid of what he was about to become again.

And in this "him," there is a me I have never been. But that I am becoming. A mental form slipping into my articulations, testing my teeth, tasting my saliva. I feel his doubts beneath my nerves, his memory lodged like a drop of bile under the tongue. He doesn’t take possession. He crouches in a fold. And I carry him. Without fusion. Without hatred. With that kind of fatigue reserved for those who return too late.

And I... now, I’ve spoken him.

And what I feel... is not possession.

It’s worse.

It’s a transmission.

I have become the passage.

And what passed through does not belong to me.

But it took my mouth.

And I will never know exactly what I gave.

But I know...

that it has begun.

And this beginning... I don’t know if it opens me or closes me. I don’t know if what passed through me seeks to survive, to live again, or simply to die through another mouth. But something remains. A mist lodged between the palate and the breath. A remanence. A tepid presence that no longer speaks... but waits. And I stay here, silent — but inhabited.