I Turned Myself into Poetry

I do not need to understand everything, and so I turn myself into poetry. I turn myself into poetry so that mystery will not hurt so much, so that chaos will have rhythm, I open myself to the word until words become a home in the center of my chest. And in a world that shouts, my words whisper their verses, grant dignity without lowering their gaze, tenderly embrace even the cruelest reality. I, tired of injustice, of seeing hungry young and mothers of every species without hope, become poetry so I will not die of sadness. I inhabit paragraphs and walk among letters, feeling the pulse of each emotion. My mind leaps from syllable to syllable as a musician searches for a note, knowing that the melody is not at the end, it is in the subtle passage from one note to another, from one letter to another.

And then I write. I write because there are pains that will not fit inside the body, because there are silences that weigh more than words and truths that, spoken directly, still find no one to hold them.

I write so I will not grow used to it. So that cruelty will not become landscape, so that hunger will not be a number, so that no child will become a statistic and no mother will have to learn to sleep with her heart in pieces.

I write because I refuse to accept that indifference is a way of living, that injustice is the price of the world, that tenderness is a weakness in times that confuse strength with hardness. And if I cannot stop every war, if my hands cannot do enough to mend every wound humanity inflicts on itself, at least I can offer them words.

Small seeds of awareness that may find soil in someone's heart. Because I do not believe poetry will save the world, but perhaps it can save us from ceasing to feel it. And that is already a form of resistance. A way of staying awake when everything invites us to look away. Of remaining permeable, even when it hurts. Of not raising walls where a garden can still grow. That is why I turn myself into poetry. So I will not harden. So I will not become what I reject. To keep intact that part of me that is still moved by a flower, that stops before the sea, that finds in a stranger's gaze the immensity of all that is human. I turn myself into poetry to remember that we are not only what happens to us, but also what we do with what happens to us. That we can transform a wound into awareness, loss into depth, bewilderment into a question open to what we do not yet know. And when I can no longer find answers, when reason has exhausted its paths and thought circles back on itself, I let the word lead me to that place before certainties, where the soul needs to prove nothing, where existing is enough and mystery ceases to be a threat and becomes company.

Perhaps that is why I write: not to explain life, but to draw closer to it without tearing its secrets away. To learn to look without wanting to possess, to love without fully understanding, to inhabit contradiction without demanding that the universe settle on a single truth. And so, letter by letter, I return to myself. Not to the woman who has all the answers, nor to the one who has learned not to break, but to that other woman, more ancient and freer, who still allows herself to feel everything. The one who knows there is beauty in imperfection, wisdom in uncertainty, and a strange kind of hope in the simple act of continuing to search. Because in the end, perhaps it is not about understanding everything. Perhaps it is about us women remaining open to the wonder of being alive, finding a melody amid the noise, a small light in the devastation, a gesture of love where nothing seemed to remain. And if one day someone finds my words and feels, for an instant, that their loneliness weighs less, that their pain has a name, that there is still a place in the world where they can rest without defending themselves, then it will have been worth it. Because I, who have never known how to explain life to my heart, have found in poetry a way to listen to it. And as long as there is something that moves me, something that outrages me, something that makes me love this world even when I cannot understand how it can be so beautiful and so cruel at the same time, I will keep turning myself into poetry. Not to escape reality, but to enter it with my eyes open, my heart awake, and my tenderness still intact. Because there are days when living is too vast to comprehend, yet fits, whole, into a line of poetry.

Victoria Inaudi