From the endless labor of translating a life into something a stranger might recognize as their own
And from those who read me
My faithful witnesses
The ones who have learned the weather of my language
Who know when a bird is not a bird
When a doorway is grief
When rain is longing wearing a disguise
When a wound has simply changed its name
They follow the migration from the literal into something far more alive
Not metaphor as decoration
Metaphor as resurrection
The ordinary transformed until it begins breathing
Until a chair becomes absence
A house becomes memory
A river becomes devotion
A single feather becomes an entire human life trying to lift itself from the earth
And what astonishes me still
Is that they come
Again and again
Not to consume the story
To inhabit it
To leave pieces of themselves between the lines
To recognize a sorrow I believed belonged only to me
And somehow return it less lonely
There is a sacredness in that
A quiet exchange
The oldest miracle I know
One human being saying
I have never lived your life
And yet I know this room
Perhaps that is why I remain faithful to language
Even when it disappoints me
Even when it fails to cross the distance
Even when I place the most tender thing I possess into another person’s hands
And hear only silence
Still
I cannot abandon it
A bird does not abandon the sky
A river does not abandon the sea
And I do not know how to abandon words
They have carried me too far
Buried too many dead
Lit too many darkened rooms
Kept me alive through too many winters
So I arrive here carrying another fragment
Another shard of light
Another unfinished prayer
Not because I possess answers
Because I possess language
And language
When offered honestly creates a bridge where there was only distance
A lantern where there was only dark
A witness where there was only solitude
Perhaps that is why I continue
Not for publication
Not for praise
Not even for understanding
I continue because somewhere beyond this glowing screen someone is waiting for the exact shape of a sentence that will make them feel less alone inside their own becoming
And if I can give them that
even once
then every unread letter
every unanswered question
every mile I have traveled through the wilderness of myself has not been wasted
Because despite everything, despite the silences, despite the distances, despite all that language cannot save
I think God grew tired of churches long before we did
Tired of men translating eternity through microphones
Tired of watching humanity kneel before buildings while ignoring the trembling holiness inside one another
My mother searched for Him everywhere
In Pentecostal heat
In Catholic incense
In prophecy
In oil pressed against foreheads
In men who claimed certainty with frightening ease
She carried God from denomination to denomination like a woman carrying a dying bird between her hands afraid that if she loosened her grip even slightly faith itself would escape
And I
I was baptized five times before adulthood
Five separate offerings to the water
Five attempts at becoming clean enough for heaven to stop looking through me
Water over my hair
Water over my eyes
Water entering my mouth while strangers said be born again
But even then I remember surfacing each time feeling exactly the same
Only colder
Surely—I thought God must grow weary of our desperation
Surely even He must ache watching us wander endlessly through sanctuaries while He waits patiently for us inside ordinary suffering
Because He was never only there
He was in my mother’s hands smelling of detergent
In the quiet after arguments
In women removing their earrings at midnight too tired to continue pretending strength
He was there the night I cried so hard my body shook against itself and no miracle arrived except morning
Except breath
Except survival
I think that was God too
Not rescue
Not spectacle
Just the unbearable mercy of remaining alive
And sometimes at night when the world finally stops speaking I close my eyes and feel this immense heat hovering softly against my eyelids
Not fire
Not punishment
A tenderness so luminous it frightens me
I never open my eyes when it happens
I cannot
The warmth feels too familiar
Like being held by a presence that witnessed every fracture of my life
and still
did not abandon me
Not when grief hollowed me into silence
Not when fear turned my body into a house of locked doors
Not when I mistook survival for failure
Not when I lay awake at impossible hours begging my own mind to spare me
It saw me then too
The woman crying quietly in parked cars so no one inside the house would hear
Every version
Every unraveling
Every private devastation carried so quietly the world mistook my endurance for strength
Seen
Entirely seen
And somehow
Still loved
Not repaired
Not rescued
Loved
That is the part that undoes me
Not heaven
Not scripture
Not the promise of eternity
Only this unbearable possibility
That something vast and merciful stood beside me through every sorrow I survived without once turning away
And joy that pure
Cannot belong to coincidence
No
That is faith
Palpable faith
Faith with a pulse
Faith that enters the body quietly until loneliness itself begins glowing from within
Now when I think of God I do not imagine judgment
I imagine exhaustion
Divine exhaustion
The sorrow of loving humanity endlessly while watching us search everywhere for Him except the places He keeps appearing
The hospital room
The empty kitchen
The trembling body
The grieving mother
The lonely woman standing barefoot at dawn trying one more time to survive her own life
And still
Still
He comes
Without thunder
Only light
Only breath
Only the strange and merciful feeling that something invisible has loved us all along
In the first image where everything is still charcoal and restraint
Where the bird is almost disappearing into all that white silence pulling something dark and endless from the center of itself as though love had entered the body quietly and forgotten how to leave
That was the beginning
The sacred stage of longing
The stage where silence still felt noble
Where I believed if I carried my ache beautifully enough it might become survivable
So I answered softly Smiled softly Learned how to make a home out of fragments
A lingering hand A familiar voice at dusk
The unbearable tenderness of someone leaving slowly because part of them does not wish to go
And I never asked the impossible question
Stay . .
Charcoal | Watercolor
Then came the color
The bruising
Blue for all the sorrow I folded inward so no one would have to witness it
Red for every part of me that continued loving even after understanding love alone cannot keep a person near
And suddenly the longing was no longer contained
Dignity fighting for oxygen Charcoal | Watercolor
It spread through everything
Through the wings Through the throat Through the hollow cathedral of the chest where attachment had already begun lighting its candles
That is what these images are, I think
The progression of a soul trying to preserve its dignity while quietly drowning in devotion
At first the suffering is elegant
Almost holy
But grief is alive
And living things eventually bleed through
Dignity fighting for oxygen Charcoal | Watercolor
So the bird darkens The colors deepen The silence grows teeth
Until one day even dignity itself begins fighting for oxygen inside the attachment
And still
The bird continues singing
That is the part that dismantles me
Not that it is wounded
But that it continues loving while wounded
Continues turning its small trembling body toward warmth even after realizing the light is already leaving
Some nights I want to tear myself free from it completely
To become a bird myself
To split open the evening with all the things human dignity will not let me say
To fly blindly into the dark Rather than remain here composed while my soul floods quietly beneath me
Because I cannot remember ever loving like this before
Not with this much ache
Not with this much silence
Not with this terrible instinct to preserve grace while the heart is collapsing
And perhaps that is the saddest thing about being human
how we continue singing long after we understand no one is coming to save us from our own devotion
I think something inside me permanently altered the day I left the hospital with my oldest son in my arms and nowhere to go afterward
My stomach stitched in perfect lines The nurses speaking softly around me as if tenderness alone could disguise abandonment
Outside families loaded cars carefully
Fathers adjusting blankets Women leaning back into passenger seats flowers resting in their laps like proof they had been carried gently through the violence of becoming
‘Rooftops’ | Charcoal | Graphite
And there I stood holding my newborn trying not to let humiliation be the first thing he inherited from me
So I called a taxi
I remember the driver asking for the address and the terrible realization washing over me
I did not even have a key to enter my own home
God . .
Even now all these years later I can still feel the animal panic of it
Not woman Not wife Not mother
Animal
A creature trying to shelter her newborn from storm weather with nothing but her own exhausted body
The taxi dropped us off quietly and I remember standing there holding my son against my chest the evening air cooling the sweat on my skin realizing I had nowhere to go
So my neighbor let us inside
And something about that moment scarred me more deeply than childbirth ever could
Because the physical pain was irrelevant
None of it compared to the humiliation of standing outside your own door with a newborn in your arms feeling less like a human being and more like some stray cat searching desperately for shelter before nightfall
And the terrible part is almost no one knew
Not my family Not friends Not even my son
Especially not my son
Because I refused to poison his love for his father with the truth of what happened
So I swallowed it
Quietly Daily For years
And perhaps that is where the real scar formed
not in flesh but in silence
The performance
God . . how wickedly I fought to preserve appearances after that
I became composed Functional Capable
I built warmth around my children while privately feeling like some weather-beaten creature dragging itself through winter on instinct alone
People praised my strength
They had no idea strength sometimes looked like crying silently in bathrooms washing your face then walking back in because small eyes were watching and you refused to let them witness the storm
‘Rooftops’ | Charcoal | Graphite
And maybe that is why I dream of rooftops
Because roofs understand what it means to endure weather publicly while splitting apart slowly underneath
Rain Heat Storms Lightning
Still from the street they appear intact
Just like I did
But some nights when the world quiets enough I can still see her
that younger version of myself stitched closed too quickly holding a sleeping newborn outside a locked door already understanding that survival was no longer temporary
Drag blankets across the incline let the night air raise goosebumps along my arms learn the language of wind instead of human disappointment
Because roofs understand things houses do not
A house remembers too much
The rooms hold emotional fingerprints The walls repeat old conversations quietly at night Even silence feels furnished
But a roof a roof faces the sky directly
It knows rain intimately Knows the ache of August heat Knows hail lightning the slow ruin of seasons and still remains open to the atmosphere
I think I belong to that kind of existence now
Open-air Half-feral Emotionally exposed to weather
I imagine myself there at midnight flat on my back watching clouds drag themselves across the moon like exhausted thoughts refusing sleep
The cold fronts arriving first as whispers The smell of rain climbing upward from the earth Tree branches below me thrashing softly in the dark like grief trying to become visible
And for once nothing asking anything of me
No performance No explanations No pretending the body is not carrying entire oceans of feeling through ordinary life
Just me and the terrible beautiful atmosphere of being alive
Maybe spring would soften me there
Maybe summer storms would teach me how to come apart correctly
Maybe winter with its clean unbearable cold would finally quiet the constant machinery of longing inside my chest
And maybe that is why I ache for height
because sadness feels different closer to the sky
Less like drowning More like weather
Passing through Electric Uncontrollable Briefly luminous
Some nights I swear I could sleep there forever letting moonlight collect along my skin letting rain baptize every memory out of me until I became less woman and more horizon
something no longer trapped inside walls but stretched endlessly open beneath the enormous dark mercy of night
As if longing sounds less dangerous when folded into ordinary language
And maybe for some people it does
Maybe some hearts were taught survival before confession
I used to think harbors were built for ship for battered things dragging entire storms behind them for vessels returning at impossible hours and their lights barely surviving the fog
But now I think a harbor is simply what happens when something weary finally finds the one place it can soften
Maybe that is why you keep asking
Where I am
Not because you need directions
But because somewhere inside you my existence has become a shoreline
something your spirit checks for before resting
So now when I think of harbors I no longer imagine docks or boats
I imagine two people finding shelter inside the sound of each other’s voice
Has existed in art longer than memory itself waiting grieving remembering becoming
The harbor is not merely a place in these sketches It is the human condition the shoreline between staying and leaving
Smudging of a Harbor | Graphite
I drew the figure again and again in charcoal because charcoal behaves like memory it smudges disappears darkens where touched too often
And the lighthouse became abstract on purpose
Some people are not meant to be rendered clearly Some loves survive only in silhouette
“Harbor | Charcoal
So I kept stripping the image down less harbor less certainty more white space more silence until all that remained was a woman an ocean and the unbearable softness of standing still while something inside her kept drifting toward shore
Watched a man bluefish near shore and called him my friend
Not because I knew him deeply but because loneliness sends strange signals across water and sometimes another lonely thing answers
He drifted there beyond the tide line half man—half sea moving through the dark current like a ship that had spent too many years navigating storms alone
And I thought about love then
How women often stand at the shoreline wanting arrival
Wanting something that docks fully Something that lowers its anchor honestly Something that says here I am I am no longer drifting
But some men love like the sea itself
Harbor | Charcoal | Watercolor
They come close in waves Retreat quietly Return again under different weather
Not because they feel nothing
Because they feel too much and fear what happens when a heart finally reaches harbor
So they remain partly offshore close enough to see the lanterns burning close enough to hear tenderness calling from land yet unwilling to surrender their last route of escape
And women
women become lighthouse keepers in these loves
Faithful Exhausted Standing in terrible weather trying to interpret distant signals correctly
Was that warmth? Was that love? Was that merely loneliness passing briefly through the harbor again?
The fish-tail made sense to me then
Because some people belong partly to deep water
Partly to solitude Partly to longing
They want intimacy the way sailors want shore after months at sea
desperately romantically and with absolutely no idea how to live there peacefully once they arrive
Still, there was gentleness in him
The tide carried him softly as though even the ocean understood how exhausting it is to spend a lifetime torn between closeness and freedom
If I could I would place every fear I have for my sons inside a small wooden box and leave it out in the yard
I think about that box often
I imagine it sitting there alone beneath the weather the grass growing slowly around it rainwater darkening the wood August heat opening tiny cracks along the lid
A plain little box holding all the unbearable parts of motherhood
At first the box would have held small things
Fevers in the middle of the night Tiny shoes by the door The sound of them crying from another room The terrible helplessness of hearing your child cough while the whole dark house waits with you
Back then I thought motherhood was about protecting
I did not yet understand that motherhood is mostly about enduring
‘Motherhood’
So the years passed and the box grew heavier
Into it went first heartbreaks Late-night drives Silences The fear that arrives when your children begin walking further and further away from your arms
And now my sons are men
Men in uniform Men standing inside realities I cannot soften for them
‘Motherhood’
So now the box holds oceans
It holds unanswered messages It holds the terrible imagination of mothers It holds the sound of a phone not ringing It holds every silent prayer I have whispered into the light
If I could I would leave the box outside forever
‘Motherhood’
I would let rain kneel over it through the night Let thunder shake it open Let wind carry pieces of my fear away through the trees
I would let winter freeze it stiff Let summer split the wood apart slowly until the earth itself began carrying some of the weight for me
Because I am tired of carrying the box inside my body
Tired of setting it beside my coffee each morning Tired of carrying it room to room invisibly while the world continues normally around me
And still when I close my eyes the box becomes lighter again
Inside it
I find warm little hands clenched in mine Their laughter moving through the hallway
Maybe that is the true shape of motherhood
a small wooden box filled first with tenderness then with fear then with all the love in the world a human being can no longer survive carrying alone
And maybe that is why the body refuses to forget it.
Not the person exactly.
The atmosphere of them. The warmth left behind in certain rooms. The way silence changed when they entered it. The unbearable intimacy of standing too close while pretending not to notice.
And even now, years or hours or lifetimes later something remains.
Like the ghost of ambergris still clinging faintly to a collar or the wrist of someone passing too near—warm and mineral and devastatingly human.
The kind of scent that makes the body remember before the mind has time to defend itself.
Ambergris
Too late to ruin a life completely.
Yet somehow still capable of altering the pulse.
Because some connections never become ordinary enough to lose their sensuality.
They remain suspended living softly beneath the skin—where longing becomes indistinguishable from memory.
And perhaps that is why these loves endure.
Not because they lasted.
Because they never fully touched the ground.
Like desire itself trying very hard to remain civilized.
you come from a woman from a body that carried you without question, from hands that knew you before you spoke, from a kind of care you never had to ask for
you were held before you understood what holding was, fed before you knew hunger, loved before you knew how to return it
you were soothed when you didn’t understand your own discomfort you were seen before you knew how to be seen, you were answered before you knew how to ask
and then you grow into a world that teaches you distance teaches you how to move forward, how to leave, how to harden, how to forget what it felt like to be kept
and you come back to us as men standing in front of women as if we are something new, something to figure out, something to reach
but we are not new
we are the same place you once lived inside
so why do you do this
why do you stand so close and still not see us
why do you reach without knowing what you’re reaching for
why do you touch without understanding what you’re holding
why do you move through us as if we are surface
not all of you but most of you
and it repeats
the same distance the same absence the same quiet disconnect as if something in you chose forgetting over remembering
because you don’t know us
not the way we feel you before you speak
not the way we notice what you don’t say
not the way we hold what passes through you without you ever stopping to see it
we feel your hesitation your distraction, your presence when it’s real and your absence when it isn’t
we feel when you arrive and when you don’t
and still
we are expected to remain
as if closeness is something that happens just because you are near
but it is not
it is as if you forgot completely what it was like to be known without asking, to be cared for without earning it, to be held without having to arrive
and now you move through us as if we are surface—but we are not
we are still that same quiet place, still able to hold, still able to know
still capable of seeing you in ways you don’t yet —see yourself
but no longer willing to be forgotten while you stand inside us
Mari Sánchez Cayuso 
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