A Map with no Legend

No importa ni siquiera

que lo comprenda yo.

Ser no es comprender

Juarroz

There are endless books in which conquerors talk about the sea holding them for months, patience thinning, courage collapsing inward. Nights with self-doubt tucked under their ribs. That primitive voice: turn the ship, undo the whole damn thing. And then, unexpectedly, the horizon shifting color, hinting at something not-water. Land. A world that refuses to match anything they knew, bending nothing to the familiar - a slight internal dislocation they can’t quite shake.

Plenty have tried to name what is encountered: trees with angles their wildest cathedrals would never dare, sounds that freeze you mid-step, calling you in or warning you, who knows. They walk blind, testing ground, tossing out names that never hold. Everything unknown, even the way the unknown rearranges their breath. They keep going - not out of bravery, but because the uncharted has its own gravity, pulling you forward even when you’d swear you’d stay still.

I never read any of those books. And yet here I am writing, sea-salt air slicing through my face in quick lucid bursts, as if their chronicles reached me without ever touching a page.

I stepped onto land after years at sea, and everything feels slightly unfamiliar. The path splits in two: one carrying the scent of what I already know. The familiar path smells like turning back, conquest folding in on itself until all that remains is the maps that led me here. Another loop. Same old song. The other path, however, still raw, unnamed, evasive, refusing to settle into language

Immersed in a kind of fog-like jungle, my steps slip forward with no real direction. Sometimes the vines of the familiar coil tight and pull me into the old known motion; other times, a voice deep inside pushes hard towards something new. Terror tangled with curiosity. Uncertainty with the thin thrill of something-not-yet, brushing against parts of me I don’t usually reach. The mix so total I can’t tell where one pulse ends and the next begins. An inner map with no borders, no legend.

I wonder if the conquerors, stepping into that new land, felt the ground shift the same way. If they sensed they were about to alter the very substance of all that was known. How long did wander persisted before the urge to force it back into old molds took over?

And I turn over in my mind, what keeps that pulse intact, untouched? How does the soul stay permeable to the unknown with the quiet ease of someone unafraid to get lost, someone trusting their own steps, someone moving toward the uncharted not because they lack knowledge, but because the unknown is the very condition of movement itself—the promise that keeps it alive?