I keep pretending to know. I dress myself in the sharp, starch-pressed clothes of certainty, walking through the world with the performative gait of one who has mapped the stars, when in truth, I am only guessing at the dark.

There is a knowing within—a dense, vibrating hum—but the moment I reach for it, it liquefies. It slips through my fingers like water, betrayed by the labels and conditions I insist on pinning to it. I require of every situation a name, a category, a neat little box where the experience can be filed and forgotten. I turn the mystery into a transaction.

How exhausting it is, this insistence on being the architect of my own ignorance.

Perhaps, I will finally stop. I will allow myself to simply be, to collapse into the vast, beautiful vacuum of not-knowing. I will empty the cup—drain the dregs of all the definitions I’ve hoarded—and let the world pour itself back into me, unfiltered and wild. I will stop getting in the way of myself.

“I” is a clutter, a frantic obstruction. If I step aside, if I become a hollow space, maybe then I can finally begin to learn. I am a lifelong learner, not because I accumulate answers, but because I am learning how to finally, blissfully, unlearn everything I thought I had to be.

© Beatriz Esmer