I lose. You lose. We are all shedding ourselves like dry skin, and it is a slow, silent bleeding of possibilities. Do you feel the void of what never happened? It is heavy. It is the weight of a heartbeat that forgot its own rhythm.

They say being alive is this: a constant subtraction. But inside the skull—no, deeper, in the place where the soul has no name—there is a room. It is not a library; libraries are too orderly, too dead. It is a humid space, a cell of mirrors and shadows where the ‘me’ of yesterday sits staring at the ‘me’ of tomorrow.

I must enter this room. I must touch the dust. To understand the wild, pulsing animal of the heart, one cannot simply remember; one must re-create. I change the water in the vases not for the flowers, but for the water itself—so it doesn’t rot the air. I write new cards for things that have no definition. We are curators of our own disappearances. I am my own archive, a private labyrinth where I will live forever, trapped and free, in the terrifying silence of being myself.

©️ Beatriz Esmer