The light is a vanity, a frantic insistence on being sure, on naming the chair, the wall, the hand. But I have found that certainty is a sterile thing, a desert of the obvious. Not all dark places need light. To flood a room with brilliance is often to evacuate its soul, to commit a small, bright violence against the mystery of existing. I prefer the corners where the shadows have grown thick and heavy, like fruit overripe with its own secret. In those places, the air doesn’t just sit; it pulses. It waits.

Some dark places are full of dreams, and dreams are creatures of the abyss. They have no bones. They cannot survive the harsh, skeletal structure of a sunbeam which demands a boundary, saying, “Here is where you begin, and here is where the world ends.” The darkness, however, is an invitation; it suggests that there are no ends at all. I move through the room and I am no longer a solid object; I am a vibration, a sequence of silences, a dream dreaming itself into existence.

To see a thing is to distance yourself from it, but to inhabit the darkness is to become the thing itself, vibrating in the center of a great, wordless “It.” I sit still until my eyes stop searching for shapes and start accepting the Great Nothing. And then, it happens: the darkness begins to flower. It isn’t a void; it is a crowded, shimmering density. My dreams don’t need the light to be seen; they need the silence to be heard. I am not hiding. I am harvesting. I am gathering the pieces of myself that the sun would only dry up and turn into dust.

©️ Beatriz Esmer