They smell like a wound drizzled by morning rain like dust lifting softly from pavement after weather like roses still carrying the cold breath of dawn
Not unpleasant
Just painfully alive
Ancient somehow
As though feathers preserve memories the body spends years trying to outlive
Strange how scent reaches the soul before thought does
One breath and suddenly the past becomes physical again
The ache gathering beneath the ribs the overwhelming feeling of having lost something beautiful long ago
That invisible meeting place between longing and recognition
The way certain scents return us not only to people but to former versions of ourselves
Softer selves unguarded ones the selves that still believed tenderness could exist without disappearance attached to it
And perhaps that is why birds unsettle me
Because when they cross the evening sky carrying the fragrance of rain and distance and earth something inside me rises toward them instinctively
Not joy exactly not sorrow either
But the unbearable remembrance of who I was before longing became part of my nature
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
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
There is something about rain in the late afternoon that makes the heart unable to hide from itself.
Maybe it is the softened light. The sound of water moving through trees and gutters.
But the moment the rain begins, everything returns.
The people we loved. The people we lost. The lives we almost had. The tenderness we still carry despite ourselves.
And suddenly I feel everything.
Every person I have ever loved. Every version of myself that survived loneliness quietly. Every moment tenderness entered my life and left before I was ready.
For one impossible moment they all come back.
My sons as babies asleep against my chest, warm and safe. The sound of laughter moving through a house that once belonged to all of us.
And then the breaking of it.
The slow unbearable fracture of a little family I tried so hard to hold together with my bare hands.
A marriage that looked like a home from the outside but inside felt like disappearing quietly day after day. The exhaustion of surviving inside something that no longer allowed me to fully exist as myself. The terrible guilt of walking away. The terrible necessity of it too.
And sometimes, when it rains like this, I still wonder.
Should I have stayed? Should I have endured a little longer for the sake of my sons, the photographs, the illusion of wholeness?
But deep down I know remaining would have been its own kind of violence.
A slow crime against the self.
And so I left carrying both grief and freedom in the same trembling hands.
Rain brings all of it back.
Quietly.
The way grief actually lives inside the body.
You stand there listening to water move through the darkening afternoon while your phone stays silent beside you and suddenly the weight of being human feels almost unbearable.
Because love after fifty is no longer about fireworks.
It is about tenderness.
Someone remembering you. Someone noticing your exhaustion. Someone asking if you made it home safe in the rain.
And the heartbreaking thing is how little of that most people receive.
Most people are starving for softness while pretending they no longer need it. Most people are carrying invisible loneliness through conversations about ordinary things.
And still
The heart continues reaching.
Even after loss. Even after disappointment. Even after entire lives collapse and rebuild themselves around absence.
The heart remembers warmth and spends the rest of its life searching for it again.
Outside the rain keeps falling steadily and inside every lit room someone is remembering somebody they loved.
Someone gone. Someone distant. Someone they still carry quietly inside them.
And maybe that is why rain hurts so much because for a little while everyone we have ever loved feels close enough to touch again.
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
It came the way certain things do. Without asking, without a plan.
As if something in me had grown tired of remaining hidden.
Nothing here is finished. Nothing has been made whole.
This digital space holds what has shifted, what softened, what could not return to where it once rested.
If there is tenderness, it is small and easily missed.
If there is opening, it is not sudden, only a slow turning toward something.
I am still learning to trust.
There was a time I believed that staying closed was the only way to remain intact.
That if I held myself carefully enough, quietly enough, nothing could reach me that might take more than I was willing to give.
And I became very good at it.
I learned how to remain how to speak, how to move through the world with precision, with control, with a kind of quiet restraint that made everything appear unchanged.
But there is a quiet cost to that kind of living.
You begin to disappear from yourself.
You begin to forget what it feels like to exist without guarding every part of you.
You begin to live as something contained, not something alive.
And somewhere in that without my permission something in me began to resist.
Not loudly.
Not all at once.
Just enough to make it impossible to return to what I was.
And that is where these words come from.
From the place I kept hidden, not because it was empty, but because it was too full.
From a self that has always spoken in images
In petals that refuse their bloom.
In soil that remembers everything.
In light that does not arrive but waits until it is allowed.
My metaphors are not decoration.
They are translation.
They are the closest I can come to saying what I have carried, without breaking it open too quickly.
Without losing what it means to me in the telling.
If you know how to read them.
You will know me.
Not entirely.
But in the places where language hesitates.
Where meaning slips.
Where something is felt before it is understood.
Because . .
That is where I live.
Between what I can say and what I cannot.
Between clarity and concealment.
Between the self I offer.
And the one I keep just out of reach.
Words arrive to me.
And I must place them somewhere, before they begin to weep within me.
They do not come when I am ready.
They come when I am unguarded.
Late, when the world has quieted.
When the hour no longer belongs to anything but what I have kept inside.
Words keep me awake.
They find me in the stillness of 1 a.m.
Insistent, unresolved as if they have been waiting for the moment I can no longer hold them back.
And I write not because I choose to, but because I cannot leave them there.
Unplaced.
Unspoken.
Turning inward until they begin to break me open.
So this . .
All of this.
Is not a narrative.
It is not a resolution.
It is a record of what happens when I allow myself to remain present with what I feel.
Without forcing it into something easier, cleaner, or more complete.
Read this as you would something living.
With patience.
With care, without needing it to become anything other than what it is.
Because I am still here learning how to exist within myself without retreating.
Learning how to stay when every instinct tells me to close.
Learning how to let something be seen without disappearing in the process.
You arrive here not as a beginning—but as something rewritten by its own hands.
Your children have stepped out of your body into their own weather, calling you less, needing you in quieter ways—like a photograph still warm from the sun.
Your parents soften into time, their voices folding, their strength becoming memory while they are still standing.
And you—you are no longer who you were when everything required you.
Now, you require yourself. You move differently—with a kind of knowing that drips slowly from the center of your chest.
This is not loss.
This is space.
A clearing where your name sounds new again.
Your hands—once full of everyone—begin to open, and in that opening something wild and unrestrained begins to breathe.
You are not starting over.
You are rearranging—like light when it realizes it no longer has to prove its brightness.
Mari Sánchez Cayuso 
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