The skin is not a wall. Oh, how we have lied to ourselves, inventing armor out of our own surface, believing this thin boundary could ever truly protect us from the unbearable weight of existence. We walk around like closed doors, forgetting we are made of porous things.

Your skin doesn’t separate you from the world; it’s a bridge through which the external world flows into you, and you flow into it…

Think of the air—that invisible, heavy ocean we drown in softly every second. It touches you, it enters you, it becomes your blood, and then it leaves you, returning to the trees and the sky. There is no beginning of you and no end of the world. We are a continuous tremor. A breeze grazes your arm, and for a fraction of a second, you are the wind; the sun burns your shoulder, and you are the fire itself, weeping silently in the light.

To live is this terrifying exposure. To feel the dampness of the morning, the sudden chill of a stranger’s glance, the way a heavy silence can press against your neck like a hand. We try so hard to possess ourselves, to stay intact, but we are leaking. We are a continuous exchange of touch, air, and longing. I look at my hands and I do not know where I end and the table begins, where my solitude finishes and the universe takes over. We are condemned to feel everything, because to have skin is to be permanently invited to the banquet of the world. And it hurts, yes, this terrible, beautiful flooding. But what a marvelous thing it is to be so thoroughly undone by the touch of a single day.

© Beatriz Esmer