It is four in the morning. A clock is not a machine; it is a pulse. At this hour, the world has no skin. It is an immense, white silence—a space so hollow that it begs to be filled, yet I am afraid to touch it with my clumsy hands.

I have two hours. Two hours before the sun, that Great Executioner, arrives to organize the world into “useful” things. I want to write a poem that does not belong to me. I have written others, yes, but I have killed them all. I threw them away like old rinds. I want to be naked of my own history. I want the birth of a word that has never been forced to mean anything.

Why must I speak of love? Is love not a fatigue we all share? To write about it again feels like wearing a dress that has been mended too many times.

Now, a sliver of light. The sun is coming to judge me. I have twenty minutes left of this sacred madness. I must stop trying to understand. To understand is a way of dying. Logic is a cage with golden bars, and I am a bird that wants to forget it has wings. Let the thoughts dissolve. Let them fall into the abyss of the Always, where time has no hands.
And then—the surrender.

I give up. I let sleep take my tired bones. But I do not want to just sleep; I want to go where the “I” does not reach. I want eyes that can see a color for which there is no name. I want to breathe an air that has never passed through lungs. I am hungry for a joy that does not know its own face.
In this moment, I am not Beatriz. I am the silence between two heartbeats. I am waiting to be born.

©️ Beatriz Esmer