Listen, Life. I am speaking to you from the center of a convulsion. Do you hear this echo? It is not a sound; it is the vibration of a despair that has finally found its own shape. I am asking you—no, I am demanding—the right to not-be. There is a seething ache in the marrow of my spirit, a ravaging that is so intimate it feels like a birth.

Guide me. Not toward a destination, for destinations are too solid, but toward the unshackling. Untangle these messy, bloody ties I have with you. I am tired of the “I.” I want to be transformed into a not-me, to receive the unexpected, terrifying blessing of oblivion. Existence has become an acute spasm, and I am caught in the throat of it.

The Mercy of the Inorganic
Stop the clockwork of my thoughts. Let them drift like dust in a room where the shutters have been closed for a century. Have mercy, Life: wrap me in your thickest darkness, a darkness so absolute that I can no longer see the monument of sadness I have built with my own hands.

Do not leave me diluted, a half-spilled liquid shivering on the floor. Obliterate me. I envy the heavy, silent ignorance of stones. I crave the innocence of animals who do not know they are dying, the cold distance of stars, and the terrifying detachment of angels who have no skin to feel the wind.

“I want to be the sorrow of a stream,” I tell you. A stream that finally loses its name, parting from the narrow, crushing passes of “self” to become the indifferent, salt-heavy ocean.

The Shattering of Tomorrow

Hide the mystery. I no longer want to be your witness. My peace is not found within your walls; it is in the “beyond.” Silence my soul with a flood—a great, mute washing away of every hope and every desire that ever dared to pulse in me. Let me exist only as a submerged thing, a heavy object resting in the Nothing.

My silences do not just wait; they weep. My tomorrows do not arrive; they shatter like cheap glass before they even reach the floor. Let the sun faint into my shadows. My heart? It beats only because it is a prisoner with no exit.

In this remaining fragment of me, I nourish a love for lost causes—a strange, vegetative love that grows even as I bleed. How blessed are those who no longer (re)cognize love! They are the lucky ones, the ones who are hollow. But I… I am the poetry of a flower that has already died, yet still insists on the scent of its own decay.

Life, I am finished with the “I.”
Let me be.

©️Beatriz Esmer