They will approach you with their measuring tapes and their small, tidy expectations. They will say your heart is a room that cannot be lived in, that it is too messy, a cacophony of too loud or a silence too quiet. They will weigh it and find it too big for their narrow shelves, or too small for their hunger, or simply, always, too much.

But you? You will look at them with the eyes of someone who has seen the sun and survived it.

You were not built for the economy of “enough.” You were raised to exhale, to let the breath of your existence spill over the edges of their containers. You were taught to expand, to stretch your ribs until they ache with the sheer space of being alive.

There is a wild, holy intelligence in your blood that knows better than to try and swallow yourself whole. You will refuse to cram your soul back into your mouth, a jagged pearl they cannot digest, simply to please those who seek a surface to touch rather than a depth to drown in.

Because, in the end, you have learned the cruelest and most beautiful truth: they want the velvet of your skin, the geography they can map and conquer. But they are terrified of the heart beating beneath it, the heart that refuses to be quiet, refuses to be small, and refuses to belong to anyone but the vast, unfolding now.

©️ Beatriz Esmer