And I continue:
Like every other day in your life before, you open the windows and look toward the street outside. You focus. Apart from what is out there, though, you can’t quite make out anything else. You never see anything else. And, even if you don’t remember it, you think that someday, someday, you will finally stumble upon something that makes you understand that the street is nothing more than a gray line, asphalt, and you’ve always wondered just how far it would take you if you followed it, though you never have. Even if you don’t remember it, that’s what you think about today while you close the window, because now you know that what caused you to open it in the first place is no longer interesting, and whatever you might see out there doesn’t matter anymore once you focus on it, and you fumble for a cigarette in the dark as you recall restless nights of sleep, but the night doesn’t bother you anymore and you find a cigarette with no filter, half smoked, you light it up in a hurry, nearly burning your fingers in the process, a pain that, for a second, tempts you. But you’re never embarrassed because nobody will ever find out, and nobody will ever know that you’re thinking about what might happen if you burned your hand, if you made a little hole right in the center, a stigma, and despite you knowing very well that that would never ever happen, you can’t stop thinking about it, because you want to know, despite no one telling you otherwise, if it’s even remotely possible for something that’s completely out of your control to happen. And right when you’re on the verge of burning your own hand just to see what’ll happen, you convince yourself—definitively, once and for all—that you can’t do it because it’s just never going to happen, kind of like the things that would happen tomorrow if only someone would realize they were happening, but either way you’d invent some believable excuse and since you know that everyone would believe it you decide not to do the wrong thing, but the right thing, because it was too risky a move, anyway: they’ll always want to believe whatever you say, but the truth burns. So you put the cigarette out, you flop back onto your bed, you stop breathing just to feel dead for a little bit, and you try to see yourself through the glass lid of your casket, but you can never quite recognize your own breathless lips, and while all this is happening the sun comes up and you feel anxious because you aren’t sure you’ve even slept at all and then from someplace there’s a voice you don’t look so well and then I don’t even remember sleeping and now who knows if you wanted to burn yourself in the first place. But nobody will ever know, and only now do you understand that. And you look for another cigarette, you light it, and you go to the kitchen to make yourself coffee thinking that you would love yourself more if you didn’t have to say hello to anyone, because you feel an uncomfortable coldness that for some reason you seem to think only absence can warm up, though you’re certain absence doesn’t exist or, if it does exist, you — specifically you — are incapable of recognizing it because you only look for ways around it but never come to any real solution, convinced that, given the way you are, solutions don’t matter, just knowing you’d be capable of thinking of one is enough. And you know, you know for sure, that today you will still be incapable of it because you can already hear those annoying neighbors of yours, and you’re not sure why today, today again, again like every other day but especially today, they’re making noise so early. Again.
When you were young nothing scared you more than thinking about war before you went to sleep, but that didn’t stop you from making a habit of it, you imagined scenes, fearfully dramatic visions like the ones you see now, the silhouette of your mother wandering along the street in search of a bomb shelter or your sister begging for food, your house destroyed, your dog dead, photographs, books, your diary, toys . . . everything burned, and your helpless brother crying among the ashes. But you only imagined such things when your father took you to sleep over at your grandmother’s house. Only in that strange room paneled with the same kind of wood as the houses for pet birds that they sell at the supermarket, with two beds—immobile—nailed to the ground, the nightstand, the closet full of hand-painted hangers that you always wanted to steal, the painting of a ship tossed about on a ruthless, angry sea, the window that stayed permanently hidden behind those heavy black curtains whose fabric fell in a forceful cascade to the floor, and that wooden figure of Christ whose face grimaced with all the pain in the world, your sister sleeping in the other bed while you would lie paralyzed by insomnia in yours, you couldn’t do anything and you knew it, and I don’t know why you ever thought about wanting to turn your bed into a sea and your body into a boat, devouring the bodies of all those sailors like the body of Christ in order to cure your insomnia as if restlessness were as beguiling then as it is now, but just as it doesn’t matter now, it wasn’t important then, since it was all a trick and you were already in the habit of lying, so you’d try the window again and when you realized you couldn’t see anything outside of it, you’d imagine a war instead. This you know for sure: you know that you will never explain those made-up wars to anybody and how when you spent the summer away from that house you could forget them or at least that’s what you thought and you didn’t want to die like that until the next summer came, but today, just today, precisely today, this exact day, on today’s date, you remember all of this as you put out your cigarette and make your way to the bathroom, thinking almost instantly once you’ve looked in the mirror without recognizing yourself that nobody can really remember who they are after surviving a war and as you pull back the shower curtain to run a bath you think for a second that you see three piles lying in the tub: one with your hair another with your shoes and the third one empty because you don’t have any gold teeth but that doesn’t stop you from sweeping a couple of fingers around your mouth to make sure all of the pieces are where they should be. Here they are: child’s teeth of pure ivory you brush in the time it takes the tub to fill with scalding water and after it’s done and begins to cool you go to the kitchen to pour yourself a coffee and you wish that today nobody had woken up but the neighbors keep making noise though you don’t ever plan on saying anything to them and you sit down on the sofa to drink your coffee one small gulp at a time until you suddenly stop to look at your hands and are surprised to see a mark in the middle of one of them you had never noticed before. You don’t know when you burned your hand and I myself can’t recall either, I only know that if it were cold you could put on some mittens to hide it but it’s hot so you decide to ignore the wound when the telephone rings, you decide not to answer but that doesn’t stop you from getting up from the sofa to turn down the volume on the answering machine and sitting back down for more coffee. And just today, this draining and unending day, you don’t want to do anything or see anyone or even go outside and it’s evident too that you don’t want to know where that gray line of asphalt leads and there’s only one way to avoid it, the same way as always, the way that’s impossible to ever really make happen now that you’re constantly resorting to it: the same, the only distraction you invent and reinvent over and over again is to find explanations, urgent excuses you abuse just for the sake of not moving, perhaps in order to try to understand why you suddenly feel panic, real panic, not some urge to talk about life or some daring impulse to once and for all confess all of your fears to the nurse and finally make everyone else understand that today you are a person who needs nothing more than blind comfort, some sort of unending support capable of keeping the world turning while it stands on its own two feet, not even moving, but I think everyone will be tired done exhausted from hearing how you suffer through hours and lives because all you really do is repeat yourself constantly without ever saying anything else and even in this moment you’re convinced, you always have been, that if they knew that today you are different, how you’ve just learned to suffer in a different way, they would understand that you can’t handle any aggression that it shakes you to your core to remember that in this life everything is worth so little, that you are a woman who is not the woman they see before them and today—especially today—you are scared of being capable of hurting yourself by mere thought or of crying because some hand that reminds you of him might just touch your face or even of suffering for the sake of suffering alone, because today you are just plain scared.