I am a droplet. Just a small droplet.

One day, I fell into a lake.
The water didn’t crave my presence,
but there I was—
falling.

With a soft smack, I broke the silence.
I shivered the surface and I started to send ripples outward.

Tiny waves fanned out toward the shore.
The lake barely remembered I had landed—
but I kept stretching and growing.
One ring, two rings, three rings…
Each of them was a promise slipping from the center,
making its way in a widening circle that brushed the skin of the water.

How many of these rings have I cast since the day I landed?

I have no idea.

Sometimes I think,
maybe the fish don’t care,
maybe the reeds just nod, in their indifferent sway,
and maybe the water laughs at my ambition.
Because who am I to think I can make any difference in this lake?

But isn’t it something—
how even a single droplet interrupted the calm?
How it pressed its will into the water and bent the shape of its surroundings?
How it insisted:
Look, I’m here, and the world has changed, however small.

Call it hubris.
Call it naive.

But here I am—
just a glistening speck, dreaming of shores I’ll never touch.
Hoping to be felt.
Knowing I might be lost, soaked up, swallowed,
lost to the lake before anyone even sees the last of my rings.

Because one day, my final ring will fade.
And the lake will still be there,
as if I had never fallen.

Still, I choose to believe—
that somewhere, I will make a lily quiver.
That somewhere, the landing of a dragonfly will shift because of me.
That one of my ripples will carry a story farther than I’ll ever know.

And maybe that’s all there is after all—
a brief moment
when stillness breaks
for a droplet
that dares to be
more than just wet.

That night,
weary of the crowd,
weary of the human machines that clatter,
I tore myself away from the noise as one sheds a diseased skin.
I left the city,
and found myself alone beneath the warm breath of the summer sky.

I lifted my eyes,
and in that upward gaze,
something from childhood returned —
a sacred astonishment, a soft humility before the infinite.

It felt like falling up.

The sky was wearing a cloak of bronze.

The stars were twirling like tigers of light
that tore through the tar of the night.
Their fangs of fire were gnawing at the dark,
and searing holes in the velvet expanse,
like nails hammered deep in the welkin's bark.

I breathed in the beauty of this funereal veil,
That takes its source from the void that won’t echo,
And that reminded me that I’m only a mote in the abyss.

I stood there—
alone.
Like a moon-fisher
Lost in a sea of wilted flowers,
casting lines into the void.

I baited my hook with pieces of my own heart,
Hoping that something would bite
and pull back from the ether.

And I waited.

I waited for the silence to shatter,
for the night to answer,
so that my dreams stopped bleeding
into my waking hours.

I waited.

But the stars just kept on burning out in silence,
while my dreams kept dripping like open wounds.

I was fishing for meaning
in this night,
I was waiting for its answer
but all I reeled in were fragments,
slivers of light
that faded before I even got to touch them.

The dark stared at me,
daring me to blink first.

And I wondered,
I wondered how many nights like this the stars had seen,
how many souls like mine they had watched with that pale, quiet gaze,
while we knelt beneath their cold indifference
and called it beauty.

And still, they kept twirling.
Still, they blazed,
while I waited,
while I bled,
while I held my breath and hoped
that maybe,
maybe—
the next flicker would light the way,
maybe it would spill some hint,
some clue that there was meaning hidden in their glow,
a reason buried in their fire.

I would beg the stars to break the silence,
to stop their silent spin
and to just say something,
anything.

But I know they wouldn’t,
and that I could only choke on the ash of their silent dirge
that smothers those who dared to look up
only to find out that there is no answer.

And then—
it hit me.

What if it was never about the stars?
What if they are silent because they’ve already said all they had to say
and this eternal silence of the infinite spaces
only existed so we might pour ourselves into it?

I understood why we built gods,
erected cathedrals,
raised cities of glass and steel,
split atoms,
and walked on the moon,
why we loved,
sang,
screamed,
wrote poetry.

And maybe that’s also why I drink so much.
So, so much
just so I could catch flames
like these stars,
to be like them,
to rend the void that doesn't echo back,
just so I could look at myself the way I look at them
and believe that I could make any sense of it.

Science is too short to measure the infinite.
Art is too vain.

But this flame—
my flame—
is all I have.

And I want to burn.

I want to cast off this skin that traps me,
I want to lighten my bones from the weight of the world
bare my teeth at the cosmos,
howl at the heavens,
tear through the ether like fangs of fire,
and scrape the cold black bark with my nails.

Maybe I was born to blaze,
or at least I just need to believe I could,
that I am the beacon,
the dawn that splits the abyss,
the answer made flesh.

That night,
I felt something kindle,
as if I, too, could be a tiger of light.

That I could dare look into the dark
and perhaps even make it blink first.

They say all wounds heal with time.
But how do you measure time
in a place with no light?

I could not remember
how long I had wandered astray
in that empire of endless midnight.

Colors had all bled out.
Black had swallowed blue.
Gray had ashed over red.

The sun—
if it had ever shone there—
had disappeared behind a veil of stone
and had become nothing more
than a distant memory.

Where days blurred into one long, unbroken night,
the sadness took,
and took,
and took again,
like an insatiable parasite
burrowed in my chest,
suckling the sap from my soul
the way strangleweed chokes the life from trees,
its roots worming within me,
feeding on the rot it had planted.

I felt its bony fingers tighten around me
and pull me forward.

So, I walked
with the dull resignation
of something too tired to resist,
hauled down a path
I had never chosen,
but could no longer turn from.

The road ahead felt cursed.

Each breath was heavier.
Each step was a leaden weight,
dragging me closer
to the unseen flames
that licked the edges
of that night
that had forgotten dawn.

Somewhere along the way,
I had stopped missing anything,
except maybe—
that stupid part of me
that had clutched at hope.

Yet still, I pressed on—
though that endless march felt absurd.

It led me to the bank of the river
that had been calling me forth all along.

The black tide was whispering my name.

A faceless boatman was standing there,
hidden beneath his hood,
his lantern spilling firelight
across restless ghosts.

He seemed to be waiting for me.

I did not ask his name,
and I did not bother to ask
what price must be paid
to cross to the other brink,
because there are things you already know
before the question leaves your lips,
and deep down,
I already knew
the cost.

I thought about it.
I really did.

But just as I was about to step forward to embark,
something,
some ridiculous,
whispering ember in me
begged me to stay.

So I turned my gaze
from the void where darkness swelled,
and I looked upward.

A fragile glint absurdly far ahead
beckoned me forward
so I left the boatman, his lantern
and the churning river behind me
and I strode
upon that fateful shore,
dragging this body I barely recognized.

And the rage inside me,
the one that tried to **** me—
it quieted.

Just a little.

Just enough
for me to feel the air
still filling my lungs—
even if it tasted of fire.

Yes—
sorrow still draped its veil of stone over the clouded mornings.

Yes—
the wounds still ached beneath the stitches.

Yes.
Yes.

All of it—
Yes.

And yet,
I finally started to feel the blood flow in my veins again.

So,
I started to climb.

And,
to this day,
though weary,
though worn and weak—
having tasted the night,
having stood at the edge where the flames licked the dark,
having turned from the river that whispered my name—
higher, I rise
to emerge from the chasm.

For far beyond the ashen clouds,
I know something awaits.

Something vast.
Something luminous.

And I know—
one day,
when I step beyond this darkness
and pierce the cindered heavens,
the planets will greet me,
they will lay their blazing rays upon my shoulders
like a tender vesture of celestial gold,
and crown the scars upon my skin
with their halos of fire.

For I know the endless skies hold light
for all who dare to seek.

Can you hear it?

The silence.

Everything begins there—
in the spaces between our breaths, where our words stumble, break apart,
and dissolve in our blood.

Everything begins in these silences,
when we simmer beneath the skin,
when our dreams bubble, brew, billow, then boil up into storms
that rage just beneath our calm—
when our thoughts crash against the cliffs of our hearts,
swept by the undertow of what we want, of what we hope,
and of all the things we cope with.

When I’m taking pauses while I’m talking to you, the silence isn’t empty.

There is an intimate maelstrom that swirls within me, pressing against my ribcage.

I feel the tides twist, rise, then fall—
I feel the ocean ebb and flow—
I feel its throb that thunders like war drums in my chest.

I feel… every word I hold back, every word I almost say
like a ripple that never crests,
like a wave that never breaks.

But I like silence.

Because, I also see a glimmer in it.
I see the shimmering sway of ideas.
And I feel… softness in their rolling—
softness like the backwash kissing the shore with its foam.

Sometimes… I wish I could just remain there,
nestled in that brittle fold of silence forever.

But sometimes also, the cotton of silence wrapping around me feels so comfortable
that my thoughts become deafening,
and they pull me down, trying to drown me within myself.

So quickly, in a desperate gasp for air—
I feast on noise.

And suddenly, I crave it.
The way the world roars. The way it crackles.
So I melt into its chaos.

I want to feel its pulse, its pound, its music.
I want to drown in the drunken hours.
I want to feel my heart rise with the loudest nights.
I want to cling to laughters that veil all the cracks I try to hide.

I want to stuff the silence—
as if only the noise could save me from myself.

Yet—no matter how hard I try to escape, the silence keeps coming back.

And every now and then,
Life punctuates itself with tiny bubbles of quiet.

…

Like this one.

…

But not all silences feel the same.

There are the ones I share with her…
the wordless seconds lost in her gaze.
The silent glances.
This all feels… different.

These silences make me whole.
Whole, and yet somehow… incomplete.

Incomplete because I often dream of chiseling
from the marble of these silences—
from the air that hangs between us—
all the words, all the promises,
everything I feel for her…

This small yet enormous statue
waiting to emerge from within—
from the rhythm of my heartbeat,
from the waves,
from the storms,
from every crack…

From this silence—
where everything begins.

And there I stand,
fingers trembling, mouth dry,
a chasm yawning between us.

And all I yearn for is to set it free—
This simple

“I love you”.

Click
We took our first photograph together.

Your arm extended,
my fingers meeting yours,
in an absurdly human ritual—
the rectangle of trembling glass in your hand
caught our two shy smiles
as the warm light spilled across our cheeks,
our faces aligned like moons
briefly crossing paths
in an intimate eclipse,
as if we could trap a moment that slips
and defy time’s relentless march.

Of all the infinite configurations—
of angles,
of timing,
of souls—
of all the arrangements of light
that could’ve slipped away,
this was the one we chose to keep,
and save from eternal oblivion.

It was a spring evening.
Madrid was peaceful and light,
bathed in a honeyed gleam.
It sighed beneath the sun’s warm caress,
like a sleeper between dreams,
as if the dying star of the day were reluctant to leave
and dragged its golden limbs across rooftops
like a parent unwilling to close the door
on a sleeping child.

The warmth of spring—
and what a spring it was—
had settled over our shoulders
like a cloak of amber light
that we drank
with our awestruck eyes.

Around us,
pigeons strutted in this park
like tiny bureaucrats,
while the breeze carried the rustle
of the gossiping branches.

Nearby was this temple of old,
once cradled by the tides of Nile,
whose stones remembered the heat from another sun,
still warm from that distant desert,
but now perched on a Castilian hill,
beneath these foreign Iberian skies—
like a ghost misplaced by fate.

And sometimes,
don’t we feel the same,
like relics unearthed from other landscapes,
swept by the currents
we never meant to follow—
trying to make a home
in cities that move to unfamiliar rhythms,
where no one remembers the myths
that once raised us?

We were standing mere meters away
from the altars where incense once thickened the air,
where gods dined on gold and blood.
But these gods are long gone.

And this place now receives
nothing but picnic laughter,
the squeals of children chasing soap bubbles,
and the gentle chatter
of modern lovers.

The mountains watched us from afar,
unmoved along the horizon—
their stone-carved faces glowing softly
in the blaze of the sky set aflame behind them.

Above,
clouds unfurled
in velvet waves tinged with saffron and flamingo,
they drifted like heavy curtains
drawn slowly across the sacred stage
where daylight prepared its final bow.

I do not know if any gods
still haunt the ridgelines behind those mountains,
or if they would care enough
to watch a pair of mortals from there—
but if any did,
I like to think they were old,
worn by the centuries,
but peering with a kind, aching nostalgia,
grateful to rest their heavy, tired eyes
on something tender.

Something called our eyes upward.

It was an agave.
Tall. Singular.
Standing like a lone sentinel—surreal.
Its stalk rose with the authority of a cosmic staff,
unfurling into the air,
proud as a forgotten king from a vanished realm,
risen from the earth
like a titan
in a riotous swirl.

It stood wild-haired,
crowned with strange blossoms
like tiny fossilized flames.
Its limbs twisted skyward,
as if reaching
to drag the ether down.

I just kept staring at it—
this strange, otherworldly thing.
I don’t exactly know why.
Maybe because it was so incongruous,
like it had wandered in from some uncharted planet
and just decided to stay.

It was the stillness that unsettled me.
The strange, impossible calm
within me.

I didn’t notice it right away—
struck dumb under the setting sun—
but my skin knew
before my mind did.

I was…
at peace.

I didn’t speak.
I didn’t need to.
The silence said everything.
So I just kissed you.

I was…
at peace.

Because when you pull me
into the softness of your arms,
I remember—
that love can flame,
burst and bloom,
even when we feel out of place—
like this exiled temple,
like the gods who fled their altars
to hide behind the mountains.

I remember
that even when beasts stir in the dark
and gnash their teeth in the shadow
through my sleepless hours—
still, we abide.

Still, peace can rise,
like those strange flower titans
that break through stones
to defy the cities
and reach
ever skyward.

I feel this peace
in the earth beneath our feet,
in the silence
where the old gods rest
and stretch the hours to cradle us.

I feel it in our souls entwined,
in your soft, kind eyes,
in this photograph we took—
this light we chose to keep.

And…

Click.

We took our second photograph together…