There was no desert. There was only the dryness, a thing that existed before I did. I looked at the earth and it was not earth; it was a closed door made of dust. To love was to commit a crime against the void. I tried to transform it—I, with my small, human hands, playing at being a God who breathes into clay. I gave it my saliva, my blood, the heavy waters of a devotion that felt like an illness.

I read the ancient verses, the Kama Sutra, but the words were just insects crawling over a stone. They had no place to enter. I was offering a banquet to a mouth that did not exist.

The Weight of Nothing
The sky was not heavy with hope; it was heavy with itself. A neutral blue that watched me with the indifference of an eye without a pupil. I waited. Waiting is a form of rotting. I stood there until I became a part of the landscape—a cactus of nerves, bristling with a desire that had forgotten its own name.

The Revelation
Then, the fatigue. Not the fatigue of work, but the fatigue of being. My hands were raw, yes, but it was my soul that had become calloused. I looked at the seed. It was not “defiant.” It was simply there, contained in its own terrible mineral peace.

I understood then: the earth did not refuse me. The earth was the refusal. It was a silence so absolute that even a miracle would have been an insult. There is a point where the thirst becomes so pure that one no longer asks for water. One simply becomes the drought.

©️ Beatriz Esmer