There are days when you wake up from an afternoon or evening nap, and everything feels heavy.

As if returning with a hangover from a drunken sadness.

Sadness is a fat that surrounds the heart. When it beats harder and boils, this fat tends to spread and circulate through the veins and arteries, causing pain.

The stain left by sadness is called a blotch.

Sometimes sadness seeps out through our pores, our eyes, staining the lapel of our suit, the cuffs, the collar, the scarf, even the ground we walk on.

(That’s why, in commercials for detergents that remove grease stains, all the families are happy.)

Our body feels heavy as if instead of blood, mercury runs through our veins, as if we’re pierced by thousands of shrapnel from explosions that have left us deaf, with our heads full of holes through which all thoughts escape, leaving us with nothing, with burning hands full of dust and only a blur in our almost dry, dull gaze.

And so we walk through our daily lives, wrapped in a silk handkerchief.

And we search for the cure anywhere.

We look for the pill.

Even the fake pill.

The placebo.

The knowing that there’s a cure when the day is ending, and you turn off the light and see then, through the window, that outside, the sun is rising.

Which is no small thing.