The skin is a silence that screams. I look at myself and I do not see a “thing” to be judged; I see the pulse of a mystery that simply is. You dress your thoughts in heavy wool, but my body? My body is an unpunctuated sentence.

The Weight of a Gaze

To say my nakedness is a sin is to speak a language I have forgotten. You call it “obscene” or “wrong,” but those are just words, dry, brittle husks that have nothing to do with the damp, living reality of my cells. You are trapped in the geometry of “shame,” while I am merely existing in the fluid space of my own breath.

My body is not a provocation. It is a Fact. A terrifying, simple, biological Fact.

The Mirror of Fear

Why does my anatomy frighten you? Perhaps because it reminds you that you, too, are made of soft, perishable matter. You have turned the act of living into a scandal. You have taken the sacred neutrality of flesh and stained it with the ink of “pornography.”

“I am before. I am almost. I am never.”

You are offended by your own reflection because you have been taught that to be human is to be “dirty.” But the body does not know how to be dirty. The body only knows how to be.

The Finality of Flesh

Get over it. Or don’t. The sun does not ask permission to touch the earth, and I do not ask permission to inhabit my own skin. My nakedness is not a performance for your morality, it is the quiet, heavy grace of being alive.

It is just a body. And that, in its terrifying simplicity, is more than enough.

©️ Beatriz Esmer