I will make my bed in the ocean, not to sleep, but to dissolve. It is a slow, liquid demonstration in helplessness, a surrender so absolute it borders on a terrifying freedom. To lie there is to finally stop screaming.

Take my salt. It is not a gift; it is a sacrifice of the blood. I give it to the water because I can no longer carry the weight of my own flavor. They say growth is a daily practice, a right exercised by the living, but I suspect it is actually a quiet, rhythmic agony.

I am shrinking. Or perhaps, I am finally arriving. I am learning the heavy, microscopic truth of what it means to be a grain of sand: to be so small that I am finally, inexplicably, the entire world.

©️ Beatriz Esmer