I don’t fall. Or at least, not completely.
I always put myself back together. I clench my teeth, rearrange the pieces, and keep going. Not because I’m strong, but because someone has to. Because when the mental noise takes over the person you love, there’s no room for two breakdowns.
So I stay standing.
The noise was in your head. But I learned to live inside it.
I learned to read your silences, to anticipate storms, to interpret minimal signals as if they were alarms. I learned to function with a cool head while everything inside me was under constant tension.
It wasn’t my noise, but my body heard it too.
While everything burns, you function. You don’t think. You don’t feel. You just do.
For many years I’ve lived in emergency mode. When everything is urgent, there’s no exhaustion. Only tasks. You call. You hold. You wait. You accompany. You smile when needed. You lie if it calms. You even endure being called an abuser for bruises you didn’t even have time to see.
Until one day the noise no longer fits in the house and ends up in a hospital.
A hospital full of locked doors, white hallways, and people too young to be there, like Marcial. Twenty-one years old. Twenty-two. Twenty-three. Healthy bodies. Brilliant minds. Exhausted souls.
You talk to them. You sit down. You play a game of ping pong to make the moment more bearable. And you discover that many of them aren’t broken. They’re genuine geniuses. Sensitive, creative, deep people. People who feel too much in a world that doesn’t know what to do with that.
Minds with a brutal capacity to see patterns, beauty, contradictions. People who see butterflies where others only see noise. Who get emotional over small things and suffocate under the standard. Who can’t stand living anesthetized.
There you understand that the problem isn’t always in the mind, but in the environment. A world that applauds those who shout and ignores those who think. Where people only chase likes, where politicians lost their common sense, where fucking football matters more than thousands of businesses, and where most people stare at their neighbor’s garden because their own is a mess and they don’t want to see it. A world that manufactures anxiety and then sells you calm in pills.
Like in technology, not all hardware fails because it’s defective. Sometimes it’s the operating system that’s poorly designed. A system that demands constant speed, maximum performance, continuous adaptation, and zero pause ends up crashing the most complex devices.
The most sensitive ones. The finest ones. The ones that process the most.
The problem is that putting yourself back together gets exhausting when you do it over and over without real rest.
There are days when everything has that fitting room light, as Leiva and Robe say in Caída Libre. You look at yourself and don’t know when you started living like this—in tension, in vigilance, in the background. Always alert. Always ready to hold up another tremor.
And then something happens that no one talks about either.
Sometimes, when the other person starts to see a little light, you become a nuisance. Like when a blind person regains their sight and the first thing they do is throw away the cane that was always there for them. Not because the cane hurt, but because it reminded them of the darkness.
Then you’re the controlling one. The annoying one. The one who “wants to see her sick again.”
And you, who were there when no one else was, can only do one thing: SILENCE. Because explaining hurts more. Because truths bother people when they’re not ready to face them.
I don’t fall. But that gets exhausting too.
I’m learning, little by little, to find small silences within the noise. To not demand that I be the pillar all the time. To accept that holding others up also requires support, even if it’s not always visible.
And I’m starting to think that maybe the real problem is that we’ve normalized living badly. Fast. Without time. Without calm. Without care. As if life were a permanent beta that never finishes optimizing.
They tell us this is living. Until it hits close to home. Until a hospital, a broken brilliant mind, or an exhausted love forces you to look straight ahead.
Then you understand that living well means being at peace. Sleeping. Breathing. Loving without fear. Not having to break yourself or put yourself back together all the time.
But almost no one sees that. Because few have been through it. Until it’s their turn.
Maybe that’s why some songs aren’t for everyone. Just like certain ideas aren’t. Or certain minds. Or certain people.
Songs made for the broken. For those who’ve come out of hell, those still in it, those who don’t sleep or those who only sleep. For those who hate the noise outside because their mental noise already left them deaf. For those who see beauty in ruins and grow tired of the standardized.
They’re not trendy songs. They’re languages of survival.
And maybe that’s the key—not everything has to please everyone. Most follow trends; few stop to feel.
Some aren’t made for this world the way it’s set up. And that doesn’t make them weak. It makes them incompatible with a system poor in soul.
I don’t fall. But I get tired.
The noise wasn’t mine. But putting myself back together over and over again… that was.
Which pill do you want this year—the blue one or the red one?
