We move through the days as if we are gathering ourselves, piece by piece, into a pile that will eventually reach the ceiling. We have been taught, no, we have been dyed, in this peculiar ink of accumulation. It is a capitalist thirst that we mistake for a soul. We collect, we consume, and we store, believing that a full drawer is a full heart.

But look closely at the walls. We cannot see the bars of the cage because we have painted them the same color as our skin, the same color as our dreams. It is an unsustainable trap, a quiet suffocation, yet it feels like home because it is the only room we have ever known.

Our children watch us. They sit on the floor and learn the alphabet of having. They see the story line, the only one we offer, and they begin to believe that to exist is to possess. We have taken Descartes’ old, cold pride and twisted it into something even more brittle.

“I think, therefore I am,” he once said, as if thought were a solid anchor.

But we, in our frantic hunger, have revised the script:
“I produce, therefore I am.”
“I consume, therefore I am.”

We whisper these mantras until they become the very air we breathe. But it is a mistake. A terrible, hollow mistake. To define the “I” by what it eats or what it makes is to miss the terrifying, silent beauty of the “I” that simply is. We are exhausting ourselves trying to prove we exist, when existence is actually a scream in the dark that requires no receipt.

©️ Beatriz Esmer