Walking in my shoes? If you were to do that, I would feel, at once, a almost gentle pity for you. For you would not find footwear, but a maze. One of those blind geometries, without doors, where the walls narrow so much that even the freest soul would experience the suffocation of existing. A claustrophobia of the being.

Look down. See the deception: those so-called shoes do not even exist. What is there is the raw, bare foot, touching the very ground. And the ground is made of shattered glass. Each step is not an advance, it is a deep incision, a cut that reminds you that you are alive only through pain. In those splintered fragments that tear the flesh, what is reflected is not light, but remnants. Sharp images of dreams you once dared to believe in. Beautiful, once. Now, reduced to dust by a sequence of blunt blows of fate—that heavy hammer that crushes what was sweet.

“To live is a total surrender that demands an absolute courage. And I am barefoot upon what is left of me.”

If you insisted on walking in what I call my shoes, I might suggest a flashlight. But I feel, with a lucidity that almost makes me sick, that it would be useless. The darkness outside is nothing. The true dark, the one that really weighs, is the one that comes from within. It is a dense gloom that seeps in and lodges itself in the heart, making that place the home of very ancient monsters: the cruelty of the world and the despair of being alive.

I guarantee you, with the coldness of one who knows their own hell: you would not last a second. Not with these demons that do not merely walk by my side, but blend into my very blood, breathing through my nostrils every single day.

But I change my mind halfway through. Do not try. Do not even dare to think of putting on my existence. I would not allow it. Not out of selfishness, but out of a sudden, painful wave of love for your unknown self. No one, no matter how human or flawed, deserves to carry the weight of this silence that I carry. Stay far away. Let my feet bleed alone.

© Beatriz Esmer