There are days when the house feels too vast, filled only with the quiet weight of dust motes dancing in slanting afternoon light. We spend our entire lives trying to build permanent structures out of fleeting moments, wrapping ourselves in armor against the inevitable cold, forgetting that we were always meant to be permeable.

I look at the ink drying on the page—dark, jagged lines that claw their way out of some deep, hidden well inside my ribs. I wanna die believing that my life was a road that people passed through, to get where they should be heading. How terrifying and yet how profoundly liberating it is to realize this. To accept that we are not the destination, but merely the bridge. The rough stone under tired feet, the sudden shade of a solitary tree, the narrow path winding through a dense, unforgiving forest. People walk over us, carrying their griefs, their sudden joys, their heavy suitcases of tomorrow, and then they move on. They reach their own clearing. And we remain behind, quiet and worn down, smoothed by the passage of countless strangers.

Words are much the same. They are desperate little orphans we send out into the world, concocted in the shadowed corners of a restless mind and a trembling pen. They are fragments of who we are, glued together with the debris of what we witness—the sudden tear in a child’s eye, the desolate look of an old man sitting alone on a bench, the quiet violence of a parting word left unsaid at a station platform.

We try so hard to control the chaos, to make sense of the labyrinth. But perhaps the secret lies in surrender. Let it all shatter. Let it be like a mosaic of a life within a life—broken pieces of color and shadow, jagged shards of pain and sudden grace, pieced together blindly by hands that only ever wanted to touch something real before the dark comes in.

© Beatriz Esmer