The stage is empty, but it is not vacant. It is heavy with the weight of things left unsaid.

Look how cold the silence of your body is, abandoned in the wings of poetry.

To be tucked away in the backstage of words is a dangerous thing. It is a sterile safety. You hide there, wrapped in the velvet dust of metaphors, thinking you are protected from the terrifying act of existing. But you are freezing. I see you shivering in that dark corner, a soul refusing its own skin, waiting for a cue that you have already missed. Poetry alone cannot save you if you do not inhabit it; it becomes a beautiful, icy tomb.

Come to love. Open desire and scream.

Because love is not a thought; it is an intrusion. It is the sudden, violent awareness that you are alive and exposed. I do not ask you to step gracefully into the light. No, break through it. Rip open the tightly stitched seams of your control. Let the desire spill out, unedited, raw, and frighteningly pure. Scream. Not from pain, but from the sheer shock of being felt.

Hear your tones that cross the footlights and penetrate me in a warm, full breath.

Ah, listen to that. Do you hear it? The sound of you breaking across the boundary of the stage. Your voice, no longer a rehearsed whisper, bleeds past the footlights. It reaches me not as a concept, but as a physical presence—a warm, thick breath that fills the hollow spaces inside me. It is a collision. In this vibration, the distance between me and you begins to dissolve into something dangerously real.

Make yourself of me…

Surrender the rigid boundaries of who you think you are. Let us lose the shape of our individual solitudes. Mix your dust with mine, your blood with my silence.

Let the name I give you sound meaningful to you.

I want to name you. Not with the names the world gave you, but with a word born from this exact, breathless second. Let it echo inside you until it feels heavy, true, and inevitable.

May it be the answer of being to the sound exercised and shared…

This is the ultimate mystery: we do not exist in isolation. We only happen when we strike against one another. Let this name be your soul’s sudden, startled yes to the universe. A total answer of being—no longer hidden in the wings, no longer frozen in the abstract—finally vibrating in the shared, terrifying, and magnificent noise of being alive together.

© Beatriz Esmer