We are hunters of the tangible, are we not? We go about the world with open, aching palms, seeking a thing we can finally hold, a thing we can feel against the skin and breathe into the very lungs until it becomes us. We want the solid. We want the now.

But here is the secret that the silence keeps: we never truly know that when we find it—and subsequently lose it, as all things must be lost—we can never find it again. Not in the way we knew it before.

The universe is a series of shifting mirrors. We may look again and see something that appears akin to what we once sought, a ghost of a resemblance, but it is a lie of the light. It is never really the same. It changes with each new blink of the eyes, transformed by the sheer gravity of a gaze. It alters with every beat of different hearts, for a heart is a heavy, changing thing that redefines everything it touches.

Listen closely. Do you hear it? The music of the soul is sounding new again. It is a relentless, beautiful betrayal. The rhythm of each beat arrives differently to the ears that hear, because the ears, too, have aged since the last note.

We all love. We are condemned and saved by it. We love many times, yes—life is generous and cruel in that way—but never, ever is it the same way twice. To love again is to be a different person, standing in a different light, holding a handful of water that will never be the same river.

It is a miracle. It is a small death.

© Beatriz Esmer