Mari Sánchez Cayuso

Tag: storytelling

  • Hallways

    For as long as I can remember, my dreams have had architecture.

    Not mountains. Not oceans.

    Hallways.

    Hospital corridors. Hotels. Schools I have never attended. Houses that belong to no one I know. Fluorescent lights. Closed doors. Numbers I cannot quite read.

    There is always another room. I am always trying to find it.

    Sometimes I know what is behind the door. Most of the time, I do not.

    Lately, I have begun to wonder whether I have spent my entire life this way—not in rooms, but between them.

    A hallway is not meant to be lived in. It exists only because there is somewhere else to go. No one chooses one as a destination. No one says, this is where I will stay.

    And yet, so much of my life has happened there: in waiting, in becoming, in the long, unfinished passage between one version of myself and the next.

    A few months after my father died of lung cancer in 2014, I had a dream.

    I was inside a hospital. People were moving quickly through the corridors, rushing in and out of rooms, carrying papers, calling to one another. There were doors everywhere.

    Someone stopped me and said they had pulled my father out for me. He was in a room down the hall.

    Room 214, maybe.

    A woman in scrubs caught my arm before I reached it.

    They had found a cure, she told me.

    Not for every cancer.

    For his.

    They had brought him back.

    Even in the dream, I knew this was impossible. My father had been cremated. I remember thinking it clearly.

    He was cremated.

    But I followed her anyway.

    Hope has never required evidence.

    He was lying in a hospital bed, thin and fragile, the oxygen cannula still beneath his nose. He looked exactly as I remembered him near the end.

    But he was breathing.

    That was all I could see.

    He was breathing.

    I went to him as if I had been handed a miracle and was afraid it might be taken back if I asked too many questions.

    I told him they had found a medicine. I told him it was saving people. I told him he did not have to die anymore.

    He looked at me.

    Then he reached for my hand.

    He had very little strength, but his fingers closed around my wrist with surprising force.

    “Let me rest,” he said.

    Then he turned onto his side.

    Underneath him were the ashes.

    All of them.

    Ashes beneath the body that was still breathing.

    I woke terrified.

    For years, I remembered the dream as a message about death. Now I am not sure it was.

    Maybe the hallway had been there all along.

    There have been many of them since: the corridor outside my father’s room, the hallway outside my sons’ bedrooms when they were still young enough to need me, the airport passage where one of them walked away in uniform and did not look like a child anymore, the narrow stretch of my own house after everyone has gone home, a restaurant after closing—chairs turned over, lights lowered, the day emptied out of it.

    Even now, I am often standing somewhere between what was and what comes next.

    Not grieving as I once did.

    Not free of it either.

    Not the woman I was.

    Not yet the woman I am becoming.

    A hallway.

    The cruel thing about hallways is that you can still see the door behind you. Sometimes you can still hear voices through it.

    But you cannot live there anymore.

    I have spent years trying to return to rooms that no longer exist: the room where my father was alive, the room where my sons were children, the room where I believed love, if it was deep enough, would eventually become honest, the room where I knew who I was.

    But memory is not a key.

    It opens nothing.

    It only lets you stand close enough to remember the shape of the handle.

    Maybe that is why my dreams keep building hallways.

    Rooms suggest arrival. They suggest certainty. They suggest that something has finally been decided.

    Hallways do not lie that way.

    They admit that we are between things. They admit that the person who enters is not always the person who comes out. They admit that sometimes there is no revelation on the other side.

    Sometimes there is only another corridor.

    Another number.

    Another door.

    I used to think transition meant I was lost. Now I think it may be the most honest place a person can stand—not where she was, not where she is going, but in the long passage between them.

    And perhaps that is why my dreams never give me a destination.

    I have spent so much of my life becoming someone else that my subconscious no longer bothers building rooms.

    It builds another hallway.

  • Distilled

    I think life does this—

    takes everything loud
    everything unnecessary everything we swore
    we could not live without

    and boils us down.

    Not gently.

    Not kindly.

    But honestly.

    Until what remains
    is small enough
    to hold in one hand

    and strong enough
    to survive
    being held.

    I know I am a bit much.

    I have accepted this
    with less resistance
    than I used to.

    I feel everything.
    I notice everything.

    I love with an intensity
    that leaves me depleted.

    But if I were not me

    who would I be?

    I have searched my whole life
    for a smaller version of myself.

    She does not exist.

    Maybe that is all I am now—

    not less

    just distilled.

  • You come from us

    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

    you come from us

    and still

    you don’t remember

    how to see us
    how to feel us
    how to meet us

    in the very way
    we once held you

  • Living Inside Movement

    (2:00 a.m.)

    I wasn’t trying to write.

    I picked up charcoal
    because I needed somewhere to put it.

    Whatever this is. Just lines. Nothing finished. Nothing that stays still long enough to make sense.

    I kept trying to shape it
    into something I could recognize.

    Couldn’t.

    Every time I thought I had it—It moved.

    So I stopped trying to make it look like anything.

    Just let my hand follow it. That’s when it felt closer.

    Not right—just… closer.

    Same thing here.

    I’m not writing to explain it. I don’t even think I can.

    I’m writing because it won’t sit still inside me.

    Because it keeps happening and then disappearing like it was never there.

    And I’m left with it
    Whatever’s left of it
    trying to hold onto something that doesn’t hold back.

    So this isn’t a story.

    It’s not even a thought all the way through.

    It’s just me trying to catch something in the moment it almost becomes real.

    Before it moves again.

    ‘Living Inside Movement’

    I keep seeing you
    in the middle of things

    Never where anything starts, never where anything ends

    You just show up, and I let you

    Like it’s something I agreed to a long time ago without realizing it

    We talk—we always talk—about everything that doesn’t matter

    Because the one thing that does would change everything

    And we’re not willing to do that

    So we don’t

    We just stay here
    Living inside movement,
    letting it keep going
    because stopping it
    would force it to become something real

    And I think that’s
    what’s wearing me down

    Not you
    Not even this

    Just the way
    it never gets to land the way I feel it and then have to pretend
    I don’t

    The way you look at me
    like something is there
    and then leave like nothing is

    I don’t think you’re lying

    I think

    You’ve learned
    how to live inside it
    without letting it touch
    the parts of your life
    that would break

    I haven’t

    And maybe that’s the difference between us

    You go back to something solid, something defined,
    something that makes sense to the world

    And I stay here—in something that only exists when you’re standing in front of me

    And I hate that sometimes

    I hate how real it feels
    when you’re here, and how quickly it disappears when you’re not

    I hate that I’ve learned
    how to adjust to that

    How to hold it without asking for more

    Without asking you to choose it

    And I’m tired

    Not loudly—Not in a way anyone would see

    Just in that quiet place
    where something keeps going long after it should have stopped

    And still—I stay

    Not because I don’t know better

    Not because I’m waiting

    But because something in me still believes
    this isn’t nothing

    That it matters in some way that doesn’t have a place to exist

    So I stay—in something that moves, but never arrives

    And maybe one day
    I’ll get tired enough
    to step out of it

    Or maybe I won’t

    Maybe I’ll just keep
    living here—in this quiet, unfinished space

    Where something real
    keeps happening
    without ever becoming anything

    I can call mine

  • Preface

    I did not mean to write this.

    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.

    And these words . .

    They are simply what remains.

    When I choose, even briefly, to no longer hide.

  • Voltage II

    But listen

    Even lightning

    Must gather itself before it cleaves the sky

    I have gathered

    I have stood inside the anatomy of collapse and named it rehearsal

    Have felt the surge rise beneath my ribs

    And chosen—not to extinguish it—but to contain

    There is power in the unspent

    There is dominion in the held breath that does not betray itself

    You think stillness is absence?

    No—it is a field of charged quiet

    A storm disciplined into elegance

    A body that could unravel the room and instead chooses to remain

    So do not come near me expecting softness alone

    I am composed of forces that negotiate with fire

    That bend impulse into precision

    That hold entire voltages behind an unshaken gaze

    And if I touch you—it will not be by accident

    It will be because I have decided exactly how much of the current you can survive

    To be continued . .

  • Inescapable

    This is written from a place of quiet weariness. Where I see clearly and still do not leave, where something remains. Not because it is easy, but because it will not loosen its hold on me. There are moments when it gathers in my chest, so completely I could cry from exhaustion. Not because I do not understand. But because I understand, and remain.

    ••••••••

    When you grow tired.

    Understand that I have been standing for some time – within a quiet depletion.

    A subtle undoing that gathers without spectacle without witness – without relief.

    It accumulates – not from absence – but from the persistence of what remains – from the repeated deferral of what has already taken shape.

    In everything – but admission – In moving alongside something undeniable – While denying its rightful form in preserving composure.

    While something within me presses with increasing clarity – Against its containment- Against the careful discipline -We impose upon it.

    I recognize it – In the measured duration of your nearness – In the deliberate incompleteness.

    Leaving me suspended As though finality itself Were a boundary – We are unwilling to cross – As though definition- Would demand more than we are prepared to concede.

    And yet – What exists does not diminish – It gathers – It consolidates itself – In the spaces you leave unoccupied – In the quiet disarray – Of my interior world – In the gradual yielding of the structures – I once believed sufficient.

    There is no reprieve in this – No restoration. Only a sustained interior tension. Precise. Unarticulated. And yet entirely present.

    That neither dissipates. Not resolves into something gentler. It is exacting in its continuity.

    It endures without permission. Without confirmation. Without the courtesy of resolution.

    And still – I remain within its influence. Not out of uncertainty.

    For I – Perceive it with an exactness. That admits no illusion. But because there is within you – A force – I do not readily dismiss.

    A quiet insistence – That continues to draw me inward. Despite the fatigue it leaves in its wake.

    It is not softness. It is not yearning alone. It is something more exacting.

    Something that persists. Even as I grow weary of its lack of conclusion.

    Even as I begin to understand – the cost of its continuation. There are moments in which I consider departure – Not as escape – But as preservation.

    And yet even in that consideration – I feel its return – Not as urgency.

    But as inevitability. And so I persist. Not unaware. Not untouched. Not unaltered. But still unwilling – Or perhaps unable to withdraw from what continues to exist between us with a certainty that requires nothing.

    That offers nothing. And yet remains – Unrelinquished – Unresolved – And entirely – Inescapable.

    To be continued . .