The afternoon did not begin; it accumulated. It was a weight of light, a thick yellow that pasted itself to the windowpanes, waiting.

Inside the dark, quiet earth of the chest, something was happening without permission. It was an almost painful itch of existence. The Earth danced to life as mixtures of rain and sun stirred my dormant seeds. It was not a grand, theatrical dance, but a secret, microscopic shudder. A root is a blind finger searching for God in the mud. To be born is a violence of light piercing through the heavy, wet soil. I felt the water sink deep, cold and sharp, while the sun pulled from above with the insistence of a hand grasping hair. I was being unraveled.

Then, the ground ceased to be a floor.

Suddenly, there was no weight. To lose one’s gravity is to lose one’s name. I became nothing but a wide, staring eye. And I danced to life as I was floating among the stars.

Among the stars, there is no up or down, only the vertigo of being. I was no longer the seed; I was the space between the constellations. I danced, but it was a motionless choreography—the dance of a speck of dust caught in a beam of cosmic light. The stars did not blink; they watched me with the cold, eternal indifference of diamonds. And yet, it was precisely in that indifference that I found my freedom. I was completely alone, and therefore, I was everything.

A red heart—❤️—is such a small, human thing to leave behind on the ground. A tiny, pulsing punctuation mark. Up there, floating in the dark velvet of the universe, the heart stretches until it is as wide as the night itself. It ceases to beat; it simply glows.

© Beatriz Esmer