There are fragments of time that refuse to belong to the calendar. I don’t look at a clock; sometimes I don’t even know what day is today. Days are mere human inventions, clumsy labels we stick onto the raw, bleeding edge of eternity. But the night—ah, the night is a living thing.

I’ve spent so many nights awake that I usually know the time within around ten or twenty minutes. It is not knowledge born of numbers, but of instinct, a subterranean pulse beating against my ribs. I know the texture of the passing hours—heavy like wet clay at midnight, brittle like dry leaves at three in the morning.

And more than that, I know the texture of my thoughts as the night abrades them. They start sharp, angular, desperate to grasp onto something solid. Then, slowly, the silence wears them down. The darkness rubs against the edges of my mind until everything is smoothed out, polished by solitude into a silent, breathing question. I am not waiting for dawn. I am simply existing inside the pause between one heartbeat and the next, where time has no face, only weight.

© Beatriz Esmer