There is a raw, sharp edge to the way I exist, and I ask you to touch it not with reverence, but with the heavy, unmeasured weight of your hands. Love me hard and careless, baby. Love me in the way a torn nylon catches on a splintered floorboard—sudden, accidental, yet leaving a thread behind that can never quite be pulled away. Love me with the smell of dusty canvases, of oil and turpentine drying slowly in a room where the windows haven’t been opened to the wind in days. Love me with enough black paint to coat every empty, bleeding road that still waits to be built inside this chest.

Love me like a bridge cast across a void, offering protection against the abyss, but love me also as the quiet, humiliating dust that settles thick and gray on the rims of last week’s cold coffee cups. Love my writer’s block—that heavy, terrifying silence where words refuse to breathe. Love me in the agonizing act of waiting, in the long, hollow hours when time loses its shape and melts against the clock. Love all of me, love the entirety of my disjointed, chaotic whole, and in return, I will hold you with every limb, with every square mile of my being that still has the strength to pave a foundation for your feet.

Yet, because we are human and terribly clumsy in our survival, there will be mornings when I drop you carelessly at my own feet, letting you shatter against the routine of the day. There will be nights when I am so lost inside my own labyrinth that I will forget to drive by your curb. In the thick, suffocating dark, I might even call you by another name, letting a ghost slip past my lips, or I will scribble your essence onto the margins of my letters as if you were someone else, a stranger I am trying to decode.

Still, love me in the messy, imperfect ways you know best. And somehow, stumbling through the dark and the light, we will learn how to compromise on the shape of our breathing. ❤️

© Beatriz Esmer