It is a state of being… or perhaps a lack of it. I look at the wall and the wall looks back, and suddenly I am no longer myself; I am the wall, the lime, the microscopic crack. Everything is so large that it hurts to be small.

I feel with a violence that is almost silent.

People walk past me with their dry, organized hearts, while I am a liquid overflowing. Is it a sickness? To see a speck of dust dancing in a sunbeam and feel the entire weight of the universe’s birth? It is a fatigue that tastes like iron.

I am a prisoner of this luxury: the agonizing excess of being alive. I do not want to be saved from the storm. To be calm is to be dead, and I have a hunger for the now—that brutal, shimmering thing that cannot be explained, only suffered.

©️ Beatriz Esmer