esto no es poesía

I've archived you now.
Filed you away somewhere between lessons learned and scars I've stopped tracing in the dark. You occupy less space in my chest. Which feels like victory. Small. Shaky. But mine. I can say your name without my ribs contracting. Can hear your favourite song in grocery stores and only pause for a breath or two not the whole aisle like before, when I'd stand there among the cereal boxes, paralyzed, trying to remember if I still knew how to swallow. I suspect that healing is well. It’s less phoenix ascending from ash, all golden and reborn and sure. And more trembling butterfly, unfurling too soon. Wings still wet. Still stuck together. Testing air it doesn't trust yet. The butterfly doesn't know it was meant to fly. It only knows it can't go back to the safety of the cocoon that tomb, that womb, that thing that held it together while it fell completely apart. Did anyone ask the caterpillar if it wanted to become nothing first? To liquify completely every cell surrendering to chaos, losing every part of itself it knew, every certainty it crawled with just for the chance to fly? Because maybe the caterpillar would have said no. Maybe it would have chosen to stay earthbound, small and sure of itself, rather than dissolve into question. Rather than become all possibility and no answers. That's what you did. You dissolved me. Turned me into soup, into maybe, into who-am-I-without-you, a question I'm still answering in fragments. And I've been trying to remember my shape ever since. Piece by piece.
Some days I find a fragment the way I laugh at my own jokes again, the way I can drink my coffee black now instead of the way you took yours, the way I sleep diagonally across the whole bed like I'm reclaiming territory. Some days I'm all edges, nothing fits together. Some days I'm more scar tissue than skin. Some days I'm the caterpillar and the butterfly Both. neither and nothing, stuck between what I was and what I'm supposed to become. But butterflies, they live but for a few weeks. All that transformation, all that beautiful, terrible becoming just for a brief flight. And maybe that's the point. Maybe the question was never Will I survive you? but rather What will I become in the surviving?
I've archived you now.
You're there, yes in the way I flinch at tenderness, in the way I've learned to build walls with windows, in the way I know now that love can be both the liquifying and the wings. You occupy less space in my chest. But the space you left I'm learning to fill it with myself. With my own questions. My own answers. My own small, shaky, mine. And some days, when the light hits right, I swear I feel something flutter.

You said you needed space. I didn't know I'd become the empty part. That you meant the kind of s   p   a   c   e where nothing grows, where even light bends away from itself.
Did you know you left me weightless? Which, is not the same as free. Even gravity understands: everything letting go is still a kind of pull. Now it's just the echo of It's not you, it's physics. As if entropy were kinder than the truth.
I tried to stay civilized. Bought a plant. Named it after you. It died quietly, loyal to the theme.
I returned to philosophy as if meaning were a muscle I could rebuild one citation at a time. Camus told me to imagine Sisyphus happy. I told him to ..mind his own rock.
I downloaded three mindfulness apps. None were mindful enough.. to stop asking for a subscription. Enlightenment, apparently, is £9.99/month, billed annually for the committed.
I deleted our photos. Emptied the trash folder. Then Googled: how to recover deleted photos. Turns out closure has a 14-day undo option, a grace period for the faithless.
Friends said time heals. But time just reorganizes the ache alphabetizes loss, curates the wreckage, makes a museum out of maybe.
I rehearse what I'd say if you came back: something cool, restrained, like We were a necessary entropy, a second law neither of us could repeal.
But truthfully, I'd just ask if you ever think of me when something beautiful ends.
Because I do. Every time.
I tell myself it's growth. That I'm fine now in the way Wi-Fi is fine, technically connected, mostly functional, occasionally dropping signal for no reason at all.
Maybe that's progress: I only quote dead philosophers ..half as often.
I've stopped naming plants after people. I've learned that some questions don't want answers, just audience.
If that's not healing, it's at least good comic timing the kind that comes from knowing the punchline is always: and yet, here we are. still turning loss into language, still mistaking metaphor for medicine.
The ache has a shape now. It fits in my pocket. I carry it like spare change, like something I might need later, like proof I was here, like proof you were too.

Some days it feels like the light lost your forwarding address. like it got distracted by someone more deserving. Like gravity called in reinforcements. Like the air gained weight overnight and no one told your lungs. Like the world is happening in another room, and you've lost the key.
You wake up tired. Go to sleep tired. And in between, you expertly impersonate a functioning human. Polite. Efficient. Quiet. A+ performance. Oscar-worthy invisibility.
Nothing hurts, exactly. But nothing feels good either. The sky could be falling or shining you wouldn't know the difference.
You stop texting back. (They probably didn't notice.) You stop asking questions. (Answers were overrated anyway.) You stop hoping. Not dramatically, of course this is no grand collapse. Just a slow fade like the background music in a store closing down.
You smile. You work. You say "I'm just tired." And no one knows that you mean tired in a way that sleep can't fix.
Some days everything feels so far away. Like joy is a language you used to speak but forgot. Like maybe you were never fluent to begin with.
But beneath the static, under the sarcastic commentary, there's a soft, inconvenient truth:
This isn't permanent. Even if it has excellent stamina. Even if it keeps showing up uninvited and underdressed.
There will be a moment. Maybe not a movie montage but a flicker. A laugh that sounds like it came from you. A second that doesn't ask for anything back. A feeling that arrives without needing to be fixed.
Because even the worst guests eventually leave.

Me preguntan de dónde soy como si la respuesta cupiera en una sola frase. Como si no cambiara cada vez que hago la maleta, cruzo una línea, o traduzco partes de mí en versiones que ellos puedan sostener.
Soy de ese olor a casa que se queda en la ropa en los aeropuertos. De abrazos de despedida que duran más que la memoria. De controles en la frontera y ojos que esperan, y preguntas con forma de juicio.
Soy de historias contadas en un idioma, y cargadas en otro. De nombres mal pronunciados y corregidos con demasiada suavidad. De una voz que no pertenece a un solo país, sino que resuena en todos.
Soy hija de los mapas, de fronteras dibujadas sin permiso, de papeles que deciden pertenencias.
He vivido en traducción. He aprendido a disimular mi acento, a compartir lo que me formó sin tener que encogerlo para no incomodar.
Sé lo que es extrañar algo a lo que ya no se puede volver. Pertenecer a todos lados, y a ninguno, al mismo tiempo.
Pero escúchame bien migrar no es perder. Es superponer capas. Es convertir la supervivencia en reinvención. Es tener raíces que aprendieron a caminar.
No soy menos completa por haber cruzado océanos. No soy menos real porque mi hogar es plural. No estoy confundida. Estoy compuesta de muchas verdades.
Y cuando me pregunten de dónde soy, tal vez la respuesta sea: De aquí. Y de allá. Y de todo lo que fui entre una orilla y la otra.

Le mani della nonna non sapevano impastare il pane, ma sapevano accarezzare le mie paure più piccole fino a farle dormire.
Non sapevano cucinare, ma sapevano tenermi stretta come se il mondo intero fosse fuori dalla finestra e lei fosse il mio rifugio.
Erano mani che sfogliavano libri, che sistemavano pieghe di camicie, che aggiustavano bottoni e silenzi.
Erano mani che pregavano piano, senza farsi notare, come se parlassero con Dio da vecchie amiche.
Mani sottili, con vene in rilievo come strade antiche, che portavano storie che io non ho mai letto, ma che ho sentito nella pelle ogni volta che mi toccava il viso.
Le mani della nonna non facevano torte, ma facevano spazio: nel cuore, nella casa, nella mia infanzia.
E ora che non le stringo più, le sento ancora, tra una pagina e l'altra, tra una lacrima e un sorriso, in tutto ciò che non serve spiegare perché lo hanno già detto le sue mani.