There is a silence that precedes the word, and in that silence, I have always been waiting for a displacement of the air.

The minute I heard my first love story—that fragile, invented thing—I began the frantic search. I looked for you in the corners of rooms, in the yellowing light of five o’clock, in the faces of strangers who held their breath just as I did. I thought love was a destination, a geographic point where two separate solitudes might collide and finally cease to be lonely.

How blind that was. My God, the blindness of looking outward when the pulse is strictly inward.

I was searching for a mirror while standing in the dark. I did not realize that to look for you was already to possess the hunger that you are. We are taught that we are halves wandering the earth, but that is a lie of the intellect. The soul knows no such division.

Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. There is no arrival, no grand intersection in a city square. To “meet” would imply that we were once truly apart, and that is the great illusion of the skin. Instead, there is only the sudden, terrifying recognition of a presence that was already there, vibrating in the marrow.

You were not at the end of the road. You were the road itself. You were the very eyes I used to look for you. We are not two people finding one another; we are a single mystery unfolding in two different directions. They’re in each other all along—a visceral, wordless indwelling, like the salt is in the sea, impossible to retrieve, impossible to leave behind.

©️Beatriz Esmer