Excerpt:

Where Nothing Grows

Sometimes I wake

and feel my body is an abandoned building—

wires exposed,

stained walls,

and a silence so heavy

that not even the rats dare cross it.

I walk with the certainty

that something in me died long ago

and no one attended the funeral.

Not even me.

I just let the emotional corpse

cool in a corner

until it became part of the furniture.

There are days when my mind takes me

by the hand

like a cruel mother,

showing me all my failures

one by one,

lined up like broken trophies on a shelf:

“Look,” it whispers,

“here’s what you could have been…

and here’s what you ruined.”

My heart beats, yes,

but it beats like an old engine

that moves nothing,

only trembles out of habit,

warming the air a little

before growing cold again.

And when I try to fix myself,

I do it with rusty tools,

with trembling hands

that make the wound worse

while claiming they’re trying to save it.

I repair my ruins

like someone trying to put out a fire

with a glass of water:

sabotaging myself

while pretending I’m moving forward.

Sometimes I feel like a well with no rope,

a place no one looks into twice.

A point on the map

marked with a

“Do not enter. Nothing grows here...

..."

–Continue reading in its original Castilian language at https://fictograma.com/ , an open source Spanish community of writers–