I was overdosing on your sorrow. Not a death, really, but a terrifying expansion of life where there was no room left for me. I became a container for your shadows, drunk on the ache that shaped your soul until my own edges began to blur, dissolving into the salt of your unshed tears. Every sigh you exhaled was a bitter echo, a hollow sound that didn’t just ring, it pulled. It pulled me deeper into the cold, into that silent, underwater place where the heart forgets how to beat for itself.

I wanted more. I wanted to be high on your feelings, to let them burn like a raw, white flame beneath my skin. I craved the combustion. I wanted to be set floating, soaring past the ceiling until the world below was nothing but a speck of dust, held together by a love so fierce, so impossibly paper-thin that a single breath might tear us both apart. Is that not what we ask of the soul? To break so that it may finally open?

“To think is an act. To feel is a fact.”

But then, the clarity, sharp and unwanted. Love was never just this fever, this agitated pulse we mistake for being alive. It wasn’t the high we chase in vain through the dark corridors of another person’s mind.

No, it lives elsewhere. It lives in the spaces between the quiet shivers, in the terrifying stillness of a Tuesday afternoon. It is a whisper soft, a sweet refrain that does not need to scream to be felt. It is the thing that remains when the intoxication ends and we are left, finally, with the unbearable weight of being seen.

©️ Beatriz Esmer