I have counted stars as if they were coins for a debt I never owed. I have romanced Error, feeling its cold breath against my neck, and I have been married, which is its own kind of star-counting. I have been drowned in too much wine and parched by too little, always thirsty for a liquid that does not exist.

Once, I fell into another country. It was ugly. A physical rejection of the earth.

I have been a merchant of the impossible: I sold ice to Eskimos and, eventually, I sold my soul. But then, in a fit of inexplicable grace, I liberated the souls of others. I have burned the rice, the bread, and my own reputation, watching the smoke rise like a signal fire. I have dodged Death as if she were a clumsy dancer, and I have dubbed my mother’s voice until I could no longer hear my own.

I took hallucinogens to see, semancol to know, and disappearing tea to vanish. I fell in love with an accent, not the words, but the way the air curled around the tongue. I have embraced my masters and I have fled; I have killed and I have died, many times before dinner.

Ugliness once drew me in with its honest teeth, while sweetness eventually made me gag. I have wept into the lap of the Night, that great, dark mother, and in the arms of Solitude, and against the chest of a man, searching for a heartbeat that matched my own. I have slept on park benches, losing the bus, the stop, my balance, and my manners.

I am a woman of halves, half-finished books that knew too much. Half-baked plans that feared the sun. Half-lived loves that died of exhaustion.

I have confessed truths that felt like lies and told lies that were the only truth I had. I stayed awake through white nights and walked through days blackened by the soot of my own conscience. I washed in the rain, in buckets, with hoses; I stained myself with sweets and scrubbed my dirty laundry on the sticky tables of bars.

©️Beatriz Esmer