Love arrived not with flowers, nor with fanfare, but with quiet hunger.
No
It did not ask permission. It did not knock. It simply came—soft as dusk, sure as tide—and began to eat.

First, it devoured my name. The syllables I had carried since birth dissolved on its tongue like sugar. I watched as the letters curled and vanished, leaving only silence where once I had been called.

Then it ate my identity. The scaffolding of self I had built with years of choices, mistakes, triumphs—it chewed through them like brittle parchment. I stood naked in its gaze, not lost, but unmade.

My portrait, once framed in certainty, was swallowed whole. The eyes that stared back at me in photographs no longer belonged to anyone. The smile, the tilt of the head—gone. Love had no use for images. It wanted essence.

It found my birth certificate and consumed it with quiet reverence. My genealogy, the roots I had traced through generations, were plucked from the soil and devoured. My address, the coordinates of my existence, melted into its mouth like ink in rain.

Even my business cards—those tiny declarations of purpose—were not spared. Love licked the edges, savoring the ambition, the titles, the phone numbers that once tethered me to the world.

And finally, it came for the papers. All the papers. The ones where I had written my name in hope, in defiance, in longing. Love ate them slowly, deliberately, as if tasting each version of me.

When it was done, I was not empty.

I was rewritten.

Not in ink, but in feeling. Not in facts, but in fire.

Love had eaten everything I was.

And somehow, I remained. ❤️

©️ Beatriz Esmer