The boot is not a boot; it is a period at the end of a sentence that no one invited.

In the dry, yellow silence of a world made of dust, the door is the only thing that knows how to wait. It waits with the patience of wood, while outside, the “idea” arrives. It arrives heavy, wearing a helmet, carrying a name so large it can only be delivered with a kick.

Democracy!

How strange to give a gift by breaking the house. To love a people so much that you must first shatter their privacy. It is a violent birth where the mother is a wall and the doctor is a soldier. I look at the soldier’s leg, suspended in the air like a question mark made of iron, and I feel a vertigo. It is the vertigo of the void between what we say and what we do. We say “freedom,” but the air tastes like gunpowder.

Behind the door, there is surely a woman holding a cup, or a child looking at a shadow. They do not know they are about to be “saved.” They only know the wood is splintering. They are about to be touched by the Great Concept, but the Concept has no hands, only the weight of a body trained to destroy.

Is this how the soul is reached? Through a hole in the wall? I suspect that when the door falls, there will be no democracy inside, only the dust of what used to be a home, rising up to blind the eyes of the one who kicked it. We are all trapped in this joke: the one who knocks, the one who hides, and the word that justifies the bruise.

The silence that follows the crash is the loudest thing in the world. It is the silence of a God who watches a man use a holy word to justify an unholy movement.

©️ Beatriz Esmer