It feels, at times, like a quiet evil drifts through the world. Not the kind with fangs or capes, no, that would be too grand, too easily named. It is something far more insidious, a silent vapor that settles in the corners of our modern rooms. It feeds on capital and distraction, grows fat on vanity, and rushes ever forward on the conveyor belt of empty profit. It is a hunger that devours nothingness and calls it progress. We look into the mirror of the world, and what reflects back is a polished absence.

But the soul, that stubborn, heavy thing, cannot eat money. It grows sick on the glitter of things that do not exist.

What we need isn’t another app to measure our breathing, another slogan to paste over our voids, another mirror polished by branding. We do not need to be curated; we need to be broken open. We need a revolution of the heart, a sudden, sharp cultural turning steeped in tenderness, in kinship, in humility. To look at another person and feel the terrifying weight of their existence, separate from our own, yet bound to it.

We need to remember how to fall in love again. Not with the image of living, but with the terrifying, beautiful rawness of life itself. We must fall in love with one another’s stories, the messy, unedited ones, and with the bruised and breathtaking beauty of this planet. It is a fragile thing, this world, bleeding softly under our pavement. To love it is an ache. But it is the only ache that makes us real.

© Beatriz Esmer