You believe, with a vanity that is almost endearing, that you are the sole inhabitant of this specific smallness. You imagine that the trembling of your interior is a solitary phenomenon, a secret vibration that belongs only to you. You are convinced that you alone stand before the abyss of tomorrow, squinting, trying to decipher the unreadable script of what is to come. You fear the world—that great, devouring mouth—as if its hunger were directed specifically at your fragile, singular marrow.

But look: the horror is not in the being, but in the forgetting.

We are all, in our essence, shivering in the same dark room. We suffer—that exquisite, heavy realization of existence—and we cling to one another not out of choice, but out of a desperate, primal necessity. It is in the collision of skin, in the terrifying intimacy of touch, that the truth finally erupts: we are not separate. To touch another is to realize that the “I” is merely a thin veil.

You are never alone. The impossibility of being alone is the great, terrifying blessing of being alive. It is a suffocating, beautiful density.

In the vast, silent machinery of time, you are granted only a few souls to hold. These encounters are not accidents; they are sharp, sudden flashes of light in an otherwise monotonous eternity. Know them. Do not merely pass them by—devour the memory of them, and ensure that when you finally dissolve, you leave behind the indelible, jagged imprint of having existed within them.

The light within me recognizes the light within you, and we are both, for a fleeting, trembling second, finally awake.

© Beatriz Esmer