I woke up and discovered that my hands were not mine. They were merely a temporary shape that the universe had assumed to hold a glass of water. It is a violent kind of grace, isn’t it? To realize that nobody really owns anything. We are all just an intersection of shadows and borrowed light.

We inhabit these bodies, these heavy, pulsing shells, with a ferocity that suggests permanence. But it is a lie we tell our mirrors. At the end, we must give back the skin, the bones, the very blood that hums in our ears. We own our thoughts, those slippery, internal fish, but everything else is a loan. We use it for a heartbeat, we feel its texture, and then, with a silent ah, we pass it on. Everything.

We cannot keep the sun, no matter how the soul trembles, no matter how much we fear the thick, unyielding dark. To try to hold it is to try to grab a handful of water, it only defines itself by how quickly it leaves you.

The Sacred Hunger

Even our hunger is a cycle of ghosts. We borrow our food, and what we eat, this vital, temporary fuel, becomes the fertilizer that sinks back into the damp patience of the earth. It turns. It waits. It becomes food again. It is a terrifying and beautiful machinery of return.

“I am not. I am being.”

Once I realized that, the knot in my chest unraveled. I stopped worrying about how I would survive, because survival is just the art of managing what is borrowed. I didn’t need to have anything. Possession is a heavy, dusty thing. I only needed to borrow. To exist is to be a guest at a table that was set long before I arrived and will be cleared long after I leave.

©️ Beatriz Esmer