To exist is to be completely, terrifyingly small.

I look at the train tracks. They do not care that I am looking. Under the heavy, vertical weight of the midday sun, they stretch out—two parallel lines of molten gold cutting through the dust, leading toward an horizon that is always moving, always out of reach. Is it leading to an unknown destination? Or is it a journey home? Perhaps home is not a place at all, but the realization that we are always arriving and always leaving.

And what am I? A self that is fluid, spilling over its own borders. I look in the mirror, but the edges of my face are softening, blurring into the air around me. My smiles fade before they even finish meaning anything. What remains is only the void—a heavy, human-shaped absence. It is the terrifying architecture of what is no longer there: a lingering laughter that still scratches against the bare walls, an unoccupied chair in the corner that speaks louder than any voice. The chair is a silent, stubborn monument to the fact that someone once dared to occupy space.

“To live is to find out that we are not.”

Then comes the dark. There are dreams where daylight is a forgotten concept, an old myth we used to believe in. I close my eyes to the world and the very essence of light drains away, leaving me hollow. How easily we forget that we crave light the same way we crave love, the same way we crave oxygen. And then, the gasp. A desperate, violent lungful of air—as intense as an orgasm, as final and absolute as death itself. Life takes hold of you by the throat, reminding you that you are still here, whether you want to be or not.

Why must we ask the existential question? The fundamental truth of being does not answer to logic. To exist is to simply be. It is to stand naked and insignificant in this vast, unblinking universe. It is life, in all its agonizing complexity, in all its brutal simplicity.

It is about you. It is about us. It is about everything, which is always so frighteningly close to nothing.

© Beatriz Esmer