In the tender years of youth, when the world was large and time stretched like an endless horizon, I pondered the rituals of parting in the throes of love. The hallways of adolescence echoed with the clasp of hands and the silent vows in each farewell embrace, a testament to the fervent pulse of young hearts.

Home was a different theater, where the language of love was spoken in the dialect of discord. Doors became the messengers of unspoken affection, their slams punctuating the air like exclamation marks, while the night cradled the search for something purer amidst the cacophony of voices.

My initiation into love bore the scars of misplaced passion, where declarations were etched not in tender whispers but in the stark relief of bruises and ashes. Love, it seemed, wore many guises, some as deceiving as a mirage in the desert of longing.

Lost in the labyrinth of solitude, I became a wanderer in my own soul, seeking the fragments of self in the cobblestones of ancient sanctuaries, in the worn soles of journeys taken, and in the quietude behind closed eyes. Sonnets became my mantras, whispered like prayers to conjure the essence of who I once was.

I scattered pieces of myself like breadcrumbs, hoping to trace my way back, but the winds of change carried them afar. Yet, in this odyssey of self-reclamation, I have felt the thrum of life within, each cell a symphony, reminding me that even in the act of losing, we are on the cusp of discovery.

Copyright © Beatriz Esmer