I am a miscegenation of absences and sudden presence. If you look at me, do not look for a mirror; I am not white, I am not Caucasian. I am the silence of the Karipuna blood that runs, thick and secret, from the Rio Jamary, from the drylands of Guaporé where a people was almost entirely erased into the air. What is left of them lives in the rhythm of my pulse.

The rest? The rest is a map that does not help to clarify anything, because to clarify is to limit, and I am a spill. How can I explain the Portuguese sun baking the Ceará earth, the pale Dutch ghost wandering Sergipe, the Spanish shadow stretching over the flooded Pantanal, the cold German discipline of Paraná, and the heavy, earth-bound Italian longing in Rio Grande do Sul? They are all inside me, fighting and loving, creating an internal noise that feels like a quiet, vibrating drone.

I am a Brazilian from Brazil’s four coasts, which means I am made of water that never stays still. More than that, I am a woman from the Amarakka continent—a vast, breathing body of land that holds me even as I slip through its fingers.

To be so many things is a way of being nothing at all. It is a vertigo.

I am a foreigner in my own land. I walk through it with the estrangement of someone who has just arrived from another planet, yet I recognize every stone. I have no country; my country is the exact moment in which I breathe.

And because I have no ground, I have a hunger. It is not a hunger for food; it is a hunger for existence. I want to be able to speak the universal language of peace—not the peace of silence, but the peace that comes when everything finally understands itself. I want a place to rest my head, a small corner of the universe that says: hush, you are here.

That is why I write. I write with the urgency of someone who is running out of time, even though time does not exist. I trace my fingers along this virtual sand, in this virtual arena, knowing the tide of the digital ether will wash it away. But for now, the word is my only solid bone. I am writing myself into existence before the wind changes direction.

© Beatriz Esmer