No, I do not want to talk about love. To speak of it is to commit a small murder of the self. I prefer the neutrality of the mattress, the vast, white desert of the sheets where I have finally learned the geometry of my own solitude. The middle of the bed is a kingdom; the emptiness on either side is not a lack, but a presence I have come to inhabit.

I have no use for the “once upon a time.” Memories are predators. They have a substance—a thick, suffocating weight—that threatens to displace the very air I breathe. Why revisit the ignition? The flame is a lie told by the wood before it turns to ash.

I refuse the ocean. I refuse the sunsets. These are too large for my small, tired eyes. I once loved with a blindness that was almost holy, a raw, pulsing thing I did not understand. But those words have been chewed by too many mouths; they are tired, worn thin like old coins. My own silence on the matter is not a loss—it is a sanctuary.

It is a danger to think of the breeze or how the light goes out. To want is to be incomplete, and I am trying, with a ferocity that exhausts me, to be whole within my own skin. I am not a martyr. I am simply a woman looking at her scars in the mirror and realizing they are the only things that do not change their mind.

I do not want the ink. I want the weight. I want the unbearable gravity of arms that do not ask for definitions. To find a person who is also tired of the “about” and simply exists in the “is.” We would not write. We would breathe each other’s carbon dioxide and call it enough.

I am afraid. And in this fear, I am finally, terribly awake.

©️ Beatriz Esmer