I will never get used to myself.

There is an awkwardness in simply inhabiting my own skin, as if I had arrived midway through a play without knowing the script, yet forced to improvise every line. In the vast universe of my own existence, I am a solitary pilgrim—walking corridors that lead only to more corridors, always in search of what I know I will never find. Because the finding would mean an end, and how could something so vast ever end?

I am an enigma to be unraveled, though the threads keep tangling in my hands. An incomplete melody—a note suspended in the air, vibrating with a silence that is heavier than sound.

Sometimes, the world bursts in upon me in all its raw, magnificent scandal. It bleeds, it shines, it roars. And my most burning, secret desire is simply that it does not scandalize me. I want to look at the sharp edges of life without flinching. I want to hold the world like a fragile, breathing thing without dropping it out of sheer astonishment. It guides me, this strange compass made of dreams and hopes that somehow refuse to die, even when starved.

Where does my true essence reside? Not in certainty. Never in peace. It resides right here, in the constant, bloody struggle between wanting desperately to be and looking in the mirror only to not recognize the stranger staring back.

The world stands before me, vast and wildly unpredictable, like a great beast breathing in the dark. And I? I do not understand myself. I am a question mark walking. Yet, beneath the confusion, a strange strength roots itself in the soil of my chest—the strength to simply continue.

Because in this tireless, agonizing quest for a balance that never stays still, and an acceptance that always slips through my fingers, I discover a terrible, fierce beauty. The beauty of never conforming. The beauty of always, endlessly questioning. The beauty of eternally evolving, not into something complete, but into something alive.

🙏🏾❤️

©️ Beatriz Esmer