The dawn was not a beginning; it was a white silence, a neutral space where the world had not yet been invented. I lay there, trapped in the thick, sweet pulp of the morning light. It was an hour without skin. Everything was dangerously near.

I looked at him. He was a solid fact in a room full of shadows.

“How much more?” he asked.
The question was a small stone dropped into a deep well. It didn’t demand an answer; it demanded a confession of the impossible. I felt the pulse of the house, the vibration of atoms, the terrifying realization that to love is to lose one’s own boundaries.

I leaned in, my breath tasting of the void and of salt. I whispered into the hollow of his ear, not a promise—because promises are for those who fear time—but a fragment of the absolute:

“A little more than eternity,” I said.

And in that moment, the word eternity broke. It wasn’t a long time; it was a vertical drop. We were no longer two people; we were a single, gasping point in the dark. We were entwined not in love, but in the raw, shimmering catastrophe of being alive together. Just for that instant, the clock stopped ticking and began to bleed.

©️Beatriz Esmer