Am I just a fool? The question vibrates in the air like a trapped insect. But the voice, that subterranean pulse beneath the ribs, denies it with a dry, hard “no.” I have tasted the fruit called Life; I have felt its juice run sticky down my chin, both the honeyed light and the bile of the pit.

I am older than my skin. I have gathered a wisdom that arrived uninvited, born from the “me” of yesterday, that impertinent child who wept over shadows. Those tears were not water; they were an irrefutable lesson in the anatomy of fear.

There was pride once. It felt like a solid thing, a shield. Now, I see it for what it is: a mask held up by a tired hand. I ask forgiveness for my ignorance. I lived in the hallucination that crime pays, a childish math of the soul. But the irony of the universe is a cold blade; to be caught is not to be punished by others, but to pay the ultimate price to oneself.

Ignorance is a silent decapitation. It is sharper than any steel, nearly severing my tether to the stars, to the horoscopes I once clutched like a prayer. My mind feels numb, bruised by the heavy, gray machinery of politics. I reach out to grasp the “now,” but time is an illusion, a handful of water that leaves the palm dry the moment you try to name it.

Every tick of the clock is a small death, a violent reminder. I look at the lives I have touched and see only a residue, a distorted reason, stained by the callousness of having looked away from suffering. Is it guilt? No, it is worse. It is the realization of my own indifference.

But even this self-flagellation, this whipping of the spirit, is a luxury I can no longer afford. It is irrelevant. I must stop fighting the tide and instead become the water. I am not a fool. I am a hunger. I am a wanderer lost in the luminous labyrinth of existing. I am learning the secret, terrifying rhythm of the clock. To stay rigid is to break; I choose to be liquid. I choose to dance, flexible and raw, in the center of the symphony.

©️ Beatriz Esmer