Peel me down to the bone. Strip away the layers—that fragile, polite architecture of social existence—and you will finally see. You will see that I am an impertinence to expectation. People build small cages of definition around me, hoping I will sit quietly within them, but they do not realize that I am made of a substance that refuses to be measured.

I am more fire than water; I am the combustion that precedes the spark. I am more wind than air—not the gentle, stagnant breeze of small talk, but the gale that uproots the heavy, unspoken truths. I am more light than dark, not because I am “good,” but because I am blindingly, terrifyingly exposed.

I recognize myself in you, in the trembling periphery of your gaze. I am more like you and less like “them”—that faceless, comfortable collective that fears the tremor of a beating heart.

Do you see the residue? More soul, because I have been hollowed out by the sheer weight of being. More pain, which is the only honest currency I have left. More blood, the red, sticky evidence of my own stubborn persistence. More human, which is a tragedy I carry with a quiet, fierce grace.

This, they will never know. They are too busy reading the surface, oblivious to the fact that I am drowning in the depths.

What I am trying to say—if I can force this truth through the narrow throat of language—is that I am a contradiction.

Maybe I love too much, with a vast, ravenous intensity that threatens to consume the vessel, and yet, perhaps I show it too little. I lock the doors, I swallow the key, and I watch the world pass by, wondering if anyone can hear the frantic, rhythmic drumming of a heart that simply doesn’t know how to be silent.

© Beatriz Esmer