April 26th is Lesbian Visibility Day. I like that April is highlighted, because I've always imagined that being a lesbian has something to do with violets and spring. It has been celebrated since 2008, just when I was walking through Barcelona, exploring the possibility of not being heterosexual. In case you need to buy books this month, I would like to pass on my enthusiasm for the latest one published by Sara Torres, it is titled El pensamiento erótico.

Leave the notebook on the folding table. It's raining outside. My head is resting against the window, between the darkness and the ice. Loneliness is a plane crossing the ocean at midnight, filled with silence. The window shelters the raindrops, and the early morning gazes back at me, as if another's eyes were looking at me curiously, with the serenity that time sometimes allows.

Perhaps there is nothing more painful than the death of a child. A man, in despair, on the banks of the River Thames, amidst the dark thicket, cries out to the indifferent stars: to be or not to be, that is the question. To suffer heartbreak, injustice, the deaths that leave us helpless, the calamities of a life that, for at least two centuries, we have known has no order or meaning, is a heavy burden. Why do we endure, William Shakespeare asks us, if death is so near? Albert Camus argued that this is the true question, the one that opens up all possible philosophy: why be instead of die? Sung from different places, the wound of finitude leaves us exposed before life.

Recently, curiosity and a series of coincidences led me to the project 'No Mothers: Identities Beyond Motherhood', spearheaded by Llucia Bauçà. Ten women of diverse ages and backgrounds share the commonality of not being mothers. The project questions whether being a mother is a factum unavoidable for 'women'. This questioning, which gives voice to diverse experiences and legitimizes them, is a commitment to freedom and transgression. Because to transgress is to go beyond the mandates that each era inscribes on our bodies.

This is the last article I will write this year. December marks the end of the fiction of calendars. Perhaps that is why I intended to write about the passage of time. Reconciling being and time is an immense problem; the Greek philosophers knew it, and contemporary thinkers still think it. Juan Carlos Mélich in the pages of The fragility of the world He offers us precious reflections on the passage of time, on haste, on duration. There is nothing in the world that is not captured by the passage of time, but this past does not conform to calendars; we are almost defenseless before duration, it is irreversible.

Last week I saw The Blue DaysA beautiful documentary directed by Laura Hojman that brings us closer to the life and poetry of Machado. The title is the last verse he wrote before dying in exile in 1939: These blue days and this childhood sunHis brother José found it in his coat pocket after his death. The verse has become a symbol of nostalgia for a lost paradise, for childhood. The color blue—of the sky, of the sea—is part of Machado's poetic voice and leads us to longing, to sadness. Perhaps the blue days are the last days of his life, bathed in the warm light of childhood.

I've been reading the for a week now Love letters Between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, in Mireia Vidal-Conte's translation. Reading the letters and diaries of the writers I admire has always seemed to me a dark pleasure. We go behind the scenes, we read the private papers that time uncovers, we penetrate an intimacy that does not belong to us. As if we were the confidants of an ancient secret or the hunters of a treasure we cannot grasp with both hands, reading these love letters, which intersperse excerpts from Virginia Woolf's diaries, we gain access to the singularities of one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century.

We live under the tyranny of weak passions, rationalized and cataloged so they don't seem so frightening. We must be assertive, adaptable, and slightly happy individuals. Docile workers, subservient citizens. Despite the motivational phrases, the lists of unbearable advice on how to become functional individuals, and the commonplaces dressed up as quick psychology available to everyone, we struggle to achieve fulfillment; we are dissatisfied beings.

Sometimes, during the summer months, the hours are gray, and the sunsets cloud me, leading me to a mess that goes from me to the world, from the world to me. From the genocide in Gaza, with the images of cruelty, hunger, and massacre, to the concern for one's own life, to the uncomfortable question "what is the ethical way to live when you are a contemporary of an extermination?", but also to the small, almost inaudible questions that put my uniqueness into play, those that ignore my uniqueness; groping, without the promised compass. In the midst of this fog, I find the outstretched hand of books. I have opened the first page of The fragility of the world, by Joan-Carles Mèlich, and I have read silently that the world does not belong to us, that we must learn to live in provisionality and uncertainty.

Now that summer is starting and the hours are dragging on, the book has come into my hands. The right to beautiful things, by Juan Evaristo Valls Boix. A book that begins by vindicating Emma Goldman and her desire to dance. Goldman championed free love and dance floors, a rebellious anarchism. Feminist movements echo this sentiment: "If I can't dance, it's not my revolution." Emma Goldman understands anarchism as a foreign right, the right of everyone to beauty and radiance. A right that frees us from metaphysical burdens and allows us the lightness of being.