Love said your name and you did not listen…

It is curious how we possess a strange, almost scandalous intimacy with suffering, yet treat grace as a dangerous intruder.

Love came. It did not knock; it merely breathed. It said my name with the quiet urgency of a wave meeting the sand, and I—busy stitching together my small, urgent defenses—simply did not listen. Love sat right next to me, warm and unassuming, smelling faintly of something I used to be before I learned how to fear. And what did I do? I distracted myself with banalities. I counted the dust motes dancing in the afternoon light. I worried about tomorrow, as if tomorrow had ever owed me anything.

Love insisted. It embroidered my face and my heart with wildflowers and impossible colors, begging to be worn, begging to be lived. But I forgot it. I folded it up and tucked it away in the dark drawer of things I deemed too fragile to keep. Love whispered secrets that could have saved me, and I heard nothing—because my ears were too heavy, too clogged with the noise of my own endless demands.

How strange it is: love was simpler than breathing, yet I managed to complicate it into a labyrinth. The love that was obvious, glaringly so, I chose to treat like a ghost. “It never existed,” I told myself, clutching the blank space it left behind like a trophy.

And then came the counterpart.
The pain spoke my name once, just once, and instantly I stood at attention, bracing my spine, smoothing my clothes, ready to receive its heavy crown. Sadness pulled up a chair, settling its cold hands in my lap, and I gave it my undivided, worshipful attention.

Longing insisted, sinking its roots deep into my chest, and I grabbed it with both hands, terrified that if I let go, I would have nothing left to hold.
Loneliness walked in without knocking, draped its heavy, gray curtains over every window, and decorated my home with silence. And did I complain? No. I offered it tea. I made it comfortable.

Life had been so astoundingly simple—just a matter of letting the eyes rest on the quiet miracle of a sunset or the raw, trembling promise of a sunrise. But no. True to my nature, I complicated it all over again. I looked straight at the blinding, obvious truth of it, and then whispered into the dark: I never saw it.

© Beatriz Esmer