Ensayos y crónicas bilingües sobre fronteras y pertenencia//Bilingual essays and chronicles of borders and belonging

“The mind is its own place.”
John Milton

A muscular man stands in a dark setting, surrounded by swirling orange particles, with a dramatic light beam illuminating him from above.

I. The Silent Territory

A hundred hours without solid food is not a number.
It is a territory.
A frontier where the body stops speaking its usual language
and begins communicating in another—
older, quieter, closer to truth.

No one reaches the hundred-hour mark on impulse.
You arrive there when something within you—
a whisper you’ve ignored for years—
decides it is time to quiet the noise,
to silence urgency,
to give the body a rest it never knew how to ask for
and offer the mind a space it had forgotten to claim.

I remember that around hour sixty,
when I thought I might collapse,
I realized it wasn’t hunger trying to return—
it was the noise I used to call “normal.”
That was the moment I understood:
fasting is a mental frontier long before it’s a physical one.

At a hundred hours, hunger stops screaming
and becomes a faint shadow.
The body—surprisingly obedient—
reveals reserves you never knew existed
and strengths we almost always overlook.

Yet the deepest shift does not happen in the flesh;
it happens in the clarity that rises from silence.
There, in the stillness,
you discover the invisible accumulation you carried:
worn-out habits, heavy thoughts,
information that did not nourish,
patterns that clouded the mind like stagnant water.

Fasting becomes a mirror:
showing you what is excess
and pointing to what is missing.
And something inside begins to change—
not abruptly,
but like light slipping through a narrow opening.


II. The Inner Order That Awakens

What follows the hundred hours is deeper than physical lightness:
it is a new internal order,
slow and silent,
like sweeping a room that hadn’t been touched in years.

Forgotten corners appear,
ancient dust rises,
things you no longer need fall away,
and pieces you thought were lost resurface.

You begin to understand:
the body does not change to look different,
but to think differently.
Each hour without eating is not a defeat of the flesh—
it is a victory of intention.

As the body quiets,
the mind clears its own territory.
Cravings fade,
urgency dissolves,
and discipline stops feeling like a cage—
it becomes a natural way of walking inside yourself.

A new, honest desire appears:
to purify not only what enters through the mouth,
but what enters through the eyes,
the ears,
the thoughts.

In that clarity, you return to the heights:
to texts that elevate,
ideas that purify,
authors who shape the spirit.

“Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

You return to the Gospels,
not as someone searching for religion,
but as someone searching for origin.
You return to Milton,
to that eternal battle between what falls and what ascends.
You return to Emerson,
whose clarity flows like a river that never ages.

And suddenly you see it:
you weren’t trying to transform your body—
you were trying to remember your spirit.
You weren’t searching for a “new self”—
you were returning to the one
that had always been waiting beneath the noise.


III. The Light That Returns

This fast was not a physical act.
It was a decision of the spirit.
A way of telling yourself you are ready
to close one cycle and open another.

Ready to stop being
the distracted version of your own life.

“When you fast… anoint your head and wash your face.”
Matthew 6:17

I thank God for the strength,
for the steadiness I did not always have,
for the light that guided me here.
Because this territory is not reached by accident.

I thank life
for reminding me that the perfect universe
always receives those who walk with intention.

Today I look at myself and find a shape closer
to who I have always been—
a form hidden for years
beneath layers of hurry, noise, and forgetfulness.

Today a new path begins.
A path where I am not trying to reinvent myself,
but to remember.
To remember the complete version,
the conscious version,
the forgotten perfection
that finally returns.


IV. Why I Fasted: The Earthly Explanation

I fasted to recover perfection in my body
and at the same time
to recover perfection in my thoughts.

I fasted to clear the excess,
to hear what noise had been drowning out,
to reorder my life from within.

Fasting not as punishment,
but as return—
a return to what I am,
to what I have always been.


V. A Final Invitation

If you have ever felt the need to quiet the noise
and return to yourself,
perhaps this is a good moment to listen.

What would you find
if you crossed your own hundred hours?

If these words awakened something in you,
I’d be honored to hear it.


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