I have discovered, with the sudden, sharp clarity of a blade hitting cold marble, that tears are a form of ablution. They wash the soul, yes—they scrub away the grime of existence—but they leave the spirit shivering and brittle. And I cannot afford to be brittle. I must be made of iron and instinct, for I am tasked with walking through the concrete jungle, a place where the lions do not roar; they simply wait, patient and hungry, for the moment you decide to be soft.

I hunted for love, a scavenger searching for a mirror that would hold my own reflection. I found no reciprocity. The world is a closed fist, not an open hand. Consequently, I drifted into the trap of expectations, only to realize that the highest form of self-preservation is to expect nothing, to stand in the center of the room and wait for the void to fill itself.

I sought a love that would be a landmark, a permanent geography. Instead, I found only fugacious things—relationships that slipped through my fingers like water, leaving only the damp ghost of a touch. I had to get used to it. I had to learn the shape of solitude, to drape it over my shoulders like a coat, or else freeze entirely in the open air.

To walk is to be in constant negotiation with gravity. I tried to please, to find the golden mean among the jagged traces of a life that refuses to be balanced. I had to relearn the art of walking, not on solid ground, but on a tightrope stretched thin across the abyss of my own losses. One step for the memory, one step for the forgetting.

And so, because the silence was becoming a shout, I had to expose myself. I had to let the feelings spill out into words, a clumsy, necessary confession. I write from the marrow of my lightness, from the dark, throbbing heat of my pain, from the stale taste of disappointment, and the frantic, beautiful bloom of passions.

I carry my restlessness like a suitcase filled with heavy, mismatched objects: my mistakes, the treasures I stumbled upon in the dark, my laments. I carry them because they are mine.

I have finally unlearned the myth of the fairy tale. I have come to see that the act of waiting is a slow erosion of the heart. So, I will live one day at a time. I will live with an intensity that burns or a moderation that protects, depending on the weather of my own soul, depending on the mirror the world holds up to me. I exist in the contingency of the moment. And that, in all its terrifying uncertainty, is enough.

© Beatriz Esmer