There are sixty-five miles of sky between space and us. One hundred and forty million square miles of ocean. Four.six billion years of a history that happened without our asking. And trillions of street lamps lighting up and flickering, right now, in the solitude of places our eyes will never reach.

I look at these numbers and I do not see mathematics; I see a purest vertigo. It is the world existing beyond me, despite me, without needing my consent to be immense. A raw existence that pulses in the dark while I, in my smallness, try only to manage being alive.

But what scares me — no, fear is a fleeting startle, what I feel is a gentle and heavy nausea —, what truly terrifies me is the matter of days. How is it possible that the weight of a whole year, of a month, of a single day, or of a minute that drags on in the living room has the power to hollow us out?

The everyday wears down the teeth of the soul. The urgency of small things crushes us in such a way that, without realizing it, we lose our hunger for the infinite. One loses the almost sacred desire to understand the immensity, the oceans, the mystery of time. Living the visible is so tiring that we forget that the invisible also belongs to us.

We occupy ourselves with lasting, with protecting our feet from the cold, with brewing coffee, while the universe continues out there, sovereign and indifferent, lighting its lamps in empty streets where we will never set foot. The true enigma is not that the sky is so vast; the true tragedy is that we fit so entirely inside such a small pain, and forget to look up.

© Beatriz Esmer