It is not that the word is missing. It is that the universe itself was born with a fundamental crack, and we, the fragments, try to use syntax to stitch together what was never meant to be seamless.

Look at us. We accumulate pages, we swallow melodies, we repeat verses like an old woman counting rosary beads in the dark—a mantra against the anguish. We demand that language perform a miracle it never signed up for. We want it to be a spine. We want it to be blood.

But a word is such a fragile thing. It is a tiny, desperate hand trying to hold back the sea.

Words weren’t built to fill that void. They are merely band-aids on open wounds. White gauze over an abyss that smells of damp earth and old secrets.

You can cheat the clock for a while. You can dress the wound in beautiful adjectives and live inside that fiction for a day, a year, or ten. You can pretend the silence doesn’t have teeth. But language tires. The adhesive wears thin under the weight of so much existence. And eventually, inevitably, the dressing peels away.

The river flows red again. It was always flowing, you see. We just forgot that the color of living is also the color of bleeding.

© Beatriz Esmer