To remember is not an act of the will; it is a sudden hemorrhage of the soul. I do not “recall” my childhood, I undergo it. It is a symphony of things that have no names, a raw vibration in the air. When I think of the soccer games with my brothers, I am not thinking of a ball or a field. I am thinking of the instant, that wild, fleeting spark of being alive before the world told us what we were supposed to be.

We lived in the luxury of nothingness. My toys were not objects bought in shops; they were extensions of my own nerves. A soapbox cart, a makeshift scooter. these were inventions of a hunger for existence. We had the green fields, the trees, and the terrifyingly vast space of a dream. It was a simplicity so pure it almost hurt.

Then, the shadows. The quarrels of my parents were not just sounds; they were cracks in my own foundation. I watched the lack of respect, the temperamental storms, and I felt the scars forming like a second skin. One day, the realization hit me with the weight of a stone: we do not change the Other. We only witness them. I had to learn the violent grace of loving people exactly as they are, broken, loud, and unreachable.

Even in the darkness, there was the thread. My father’s voice, thick with stories, could turn sweet like ripening fruit when the mood took him. My mother, with her needle and thread, was stitching more than just silk and shirts; she was trying to hold the world together, one stitch at a time. I see her hands, and I see the comic books of my youth, those bright, paper escapes that taught my imagination how to breathe.

I am a mosaic of these fragments. I am made of things that have passed and things that refuse to leave. These memories do not sit quietly in the past; they burn in the present. They are the food I eat to become myself. To live without fear, to find a joy that does not ask for permission, perhaps that is the only way to touch the hem of peace. I am a story being told by the silence.

©️ Beatriz Esmer