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Shattered. I am a shard of glass on the ground.
    AUTHOR: This woman is scathing toward herself she is the sharp points of a star. Those sparkling points wound me too. You don’t know how to live based on an instant-climax: you feel it but can’t prolong it into a permanent feeling. You don’t learn from others, you don’t learn from yourself. I respect you though you’re not my equal. And am I my equal? I am I? This question arises from my observation that you don’t seem to know yourself. You might not know that there is a center of yourself and that it’s hard as a nut from which your phosphorescent words radiate.
    ANGELA: Seriously: what am I?
    No answer.
    So I throw my body away. Am I Strauss or just Beethoven? Do I laugh or cry? I am name. That’s the answer. It’s not much.
    Suddenly I saw myself and saw the world. And I understood: the world is always someone else’s. Never mine. I am the pariah of the rich. The poor in soul keep nothing stored away. The dizziness you feel when in a sudden flash of lightning you suddenly see the brightness of not understanding. I DO NOT UNDERSTAND! For fear of madness, I renounced the truth. My ideas are invented. I don’t take responsibility for them. The funniest thing is that I never learned how to live. I don’t know anything. All I know is how to go on living. Like my dog. I’m afraid of the excellent and the superlative. When something starts getting really good I either mistrust it or step back. If I stepped forward I’d be focused on the yellowness of the splendor that nearly blinds.
    AUTHOR: Angela is the vibrating tremor of a tense harp-string after it’s been plucked: she stays in the air still saying, saying — until the vibration dies spreading out in froth across the sands. Afterwards — silence and stars. I know Angela’s body by heart. I just didn’t understand what she wants. But I gave her such shape to my life that she seems more real to me than I do.
    ANGELA: My life is a great disaster. It’s a cruel divergence, it’s an empty house. But there’s a dog inside barking. As for me — all that’s left for me is to bark at God. I’m going back to myself. That is where I find a dead destitute girl. But one night I’ll go to the government archives and set fire to everything and all the identity cards of the destitute. And only then do I become so autonomous that I shall only stop writing after I die. But it’s no use, the blue lake of eternity doesn’t catch fire. I am the one who would incinerate myself down to my bones. I shall become number and dust. Let it be. Amen. But I protest. I protest in vain like a dog in the eternity of the government archives.
    AUTHOR: Angela is a lot like my opposite. To have inside me the opposite of what I am is in essence indispensible: I won’t give up my struggle and my indecision and the failure — for I’m a great failure — failure serves as the foundation of my existence. If I were a winner? I’d die of boredom. “Getting” isn’t my strong point. I nourish myself with what’s left over of me and it’s very little. There is left over however a certain secret silence.
    ANGELA: I only use reason as an anesthetic. But for life I’m a perennial promise of understanding my submerged world. Now that there are computers for almost every type of search for intellectual solutions — I therefore turn back to my rich interior nothing. And I scream: I feel, I suffer, I am happy, I am moved. Only my enigma interests me. More than anything, I search for myself in my great void.
    I try to keep myself isolated from the agony of depending on others, and that agony that seems to them a game of life and death masks another reality, a truth so extraordinary that they would keel over in fright were they to face it, as in a scandal. Meanwhile, they’re studying, working, loving, growing up, struggling, feeling happy, feeling sad. Life with a capital letter can give me nothing because I’m going to confess that I