The walls of the room are not just walls; they are the skin of a day that refuses to end, or perhaps, a day that has already ended without telling us. You see, it is quite simple.

I can love here, quietly, in this corner where the dust motes dance like microscopic jazz musicians, until there are no days left, until the calendar becomes a blank notebook and the clocks decide to stop their rhythmic interrogation.

To love in hopes is a dangerous geometry, but I do it anyway. I love the hours as if they were glass beads, and the air, that invisible protagonist, and even the people. I watch them in their smallness, drifting through the streets like misplaced commas in a giant, chaotic sentence. I love them in their ignorance, which is a kind of heavy coat they wear against the cold, and sometimes, suddenly, in their greatness, which flashes like a cat’s eye in the dark.

But there is a trap, you see. A beautiful, inevitable trap.

I cannot stop this wandering soul of mine. It is a stowaway on a train that doesn’t believe in stations. It persists in wanting to be whole, as if we weren’t all broken pieces of a mirror trying to reflect a sun we’ve never actually seen. And I go on, stubbornly, believing in a better world, as one believes in the secret passage behind the bookshelf or the hopscotch square that finally leads to the sky.

It is a game, perhaps. But it is the only one worth playing until the light goes out.

©️Beatriz Esmer