The thing about the night is that it doesn’t just fall; it waits. It stands at the edge of the bedroom, heavy, with a mouth ready to swallow everything that breathes. But I look at it, and my looking is an act of defiance.

I write for myself—for every time I refused to surrender, for the nights that tried to swallow me whole and failed.

To write is to touch the wet, raw core of being. It is an internal violence, yes, but a necessary one. They wanted me silent. They—the lovers who shamed me, the voices that tried to quiet mine, the ones who walked through the corridors of my life slamming doors. For them, I am an uncomfortable truth. They wanted a neat, packaged thing, but I am an spill of ink. I write for you, too, stranger, because in the dark, our solitudes touch. I write the narratives they chose to ignore, the stories they refused to see. Let them look away. The sun still exists even if the blind deny it.

There is a strange, wild animal inside me that refuses to lie down and die. It is a domestic beast turned feral by necessity. I write for the pain that refuses to fade, for the prodigal children who wander but do not break. We are all wandering, aren’t we? Searching for a mother-tongue we forgot at birth. I feel the suffocating darkness that waits at the edges, relentless in its hunger. It wants my submission. It wants me to crawl back into the neat, predictable luxury of suffering. Because suffering is easy—it is a habit.

But I refuse. I refuse to crawl back into suffering. I refuse to let them win.

To win is not to defeat them; it is to remain intact. Or rather, to be broken but to refuse the shape of the debris. I look at my hands. They are the same hands, yet entirely new. I have written, I write, and I will continue writing—for the softness that refuses to shatter, for the resilience stitched into the marrow of my bones. Softness is not weakness; it is the ultimate strength. The rock resists the wave and is eventually ground to dust, but the water yields and remains water. I am the water. I write new poems. I learn to survive again. Every morning is a terrifying, beautiful birth.

Curse the idea that breaking means staying broken. Curse it to hell and back.

A vase breaks, and they say it is ruined. But a human being? We are made of a different clay. We shatter, and in the cracks, the light finally finds a way in. We are not broken; we are multiplying.

© Beatriz Esmer