Millions live like this, and perhaps dying is precisely this—the slow, rhythmic ingestion of the mundane. They work in offices, moving files from one side of the mahogany expanse to the other, marking time with the mechanical pulse of a clock that measures not life, but the consumption of it. They drive a car, that steel shell designed to isolate the soul from the wind, to ensure that the view of the world remains framed, safely distant. They picnic with their families, arranged in perfect, sterile squares of green grass, and they raise children, planting seeds of their own quiet, comfortable suffocation.

It is a profound, terrifying numbness. Many live in a state of deep, perpetual slumber—an “adormecimento” so complete they no longer know they are asleep. They do not care what others are living, for to care would be to recognize a mirror in the hunger of the stranger. How hungry are the others? Starving for feelings, for bread, for a crumb of justice, while these sleepers glide through existence, their senses dulled by the weight of their own breath.

They are swallowed by worldly desires, obsessed with the acquisition of things that turn to dust before they are even possessed. Their nefarious hypocrisies are not merely masks; they are the skin they have grown to survive the light of truth. They move as if the world belongs to them, a temporary possession staked out in the silence of their own indifference.

And then, sometimes, the fracture occurs. A shock treatment takes place—a person who looks too deeply, a book that tears the veil, a song that strikes the bone. It awakens them, or it threatens to. It saves them from the death they have been practicing for years. But there is a horror in the truth: some never awaken. They remain, perfectly, horrifyingly content in the graveyard of their own making.

© Beatriz Esmer