I feel that I'm slipping away, that I'm leaving this reality of mornings and afternoons, little by little, and I'm entering a world that I am building with my desires and worries, and all the things I've held back and that are beginning to long for release; and they push me, almost without me realising it, into uncertainty, there where I must be alone, where I am afraid to go because I know that I will have to accept all the responsibility for having understood the knowledge that not everything is air and water and bread and milk; that there is something else that surrounds us, that is in the atmosphere, that follows us with hope, enveloping us in that painful beauty that we want to share and bring closer to others, but which, on the contrary, isolates us, makes us feel unreal, different, as if we were reborn into a world that we hadn't known before or as if we had journeyed to the nearest star, or the farthest, and we were completely open to the leaves, to the sound, feeling life flow out, that we were coming closer to it, to true reality, even though everyone might believe the opposite... and we cannot explain it to them.

By Giaconda Belli, translated by Simon Buxton

Huge thanks to my dearest friend Gemma who sent me this poem, especially translated by one of her teachers, and as far as we know, unavailable in English elsewhere. It was pinned beside her front door when I stayed at her flat a few weeks ago, and was exactly the medicine I needed.