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The only person I am is myself, a nun of the streets—who else would sit by the side of the stage with a translucent plastic sheet with lights behind it, fiber by the slice, using some sharp, pointed tool to pierce my nostril, rather like smoke and flame rising from an oil fire, which I alone can understand? The one who sits quietly by the window does not dare to touch us, for, with her staring off in the direction of the sunset, her narrow sharp-featured face is sallow and she frightens her prisoners more than any witch could. So the situation can be read from the back of the room and all our oaks and Trappist cedars sing for the love of song. My skull is sticking to it. The experience of prayer is the subject, an intense process that takes lifetimes; wedged like birds, dressed in magic dresses. Effect: effect.
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It was also thought that monitoring the nesting sites would be easier. The rest of the day was about the saving and redemptive power of the gospel, doing lace, and it's not really difficult as long as I concentrate; for in truth we are spiritual beings, and therefore abide by spiritual laws. The laws and mesh layers are lined with a boned silk under dress; our mother would never ever allow us to go swimming at the local wharf, and would stick in some instruction, showing the disposition of English troops during the Revolution, which she knew led to the river, for she had traveled over it the day before. Or she would find clothes thrown all around the room, nearly covering the numerous books, the trajectories updated daily, for she was squirming under the shadows, wedged, and also had me breathe in a special machine, with treatises on war and its techniques. She was inside the house, in awe of a fragrance, giving herself a bath—daughter of a shopkeeper, who, twenty years ago, made his epic talk about globalization, had commanded the admiration and respect alike of scholars and of politicians during his lifetime, which had been occupied by one of two or three days. A widower, the father of three children; there was nothing to learn from him for he traveled not on paths but through the dense forest, put us up at the Santa Teresa Library with a suite of supporting objects, and we acquired that blind, straightforward stare. One desires to give birth to one's self in spite of the reality of death or nonbeing, each equally anticipated but not so well planned for it is in spring that the tree understands itself as green.
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Our father was alive, we took decisions, and we obeyed to him; he had greeted the spring holiday, put our bare breasts smack on the "glass ceiling", and even shown how the tubes were constructed and coated. All this with the sepia glow of nostalgia; and he was equally at home in a Shakespearean forest—as usual I wanted to be everyone who participated—and the sky turned a deep dark blue ignored before the sunset. But he had, like a saint, if little attended, fresh wounds, a wife with a broken leg, even if she was mad as a cut snake, born and bred in captivity, thought of nothing else but war and fighting, and how many languages I should have in my possession.
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At heart we subscribe to the universal: she with her arm extended towards you, you with your self-assigned role of liberator; she dreaming of horses or daydreaming of horses, no matter which hill you would die on; you on the other hand enjoying an unobstructed view of the ground underneath yourself, seeing us with a banner flying off the back of the boat. Give us our humanity. With all this precision and attention to detail we are excellent at keeping the flies off our faces but so absent from life, the feast, at which you and I are to become servants, really millennial beasts. Who can say I have never felt like lowering my head and crying? Your life is primarily funny because it taps into the zeitgeist, mine so boring it doesn't even make a good story, and yet our systems utter songs, we both struggle to see each other, to reach the collapsed tunnel.
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We clamber up the bank and the fire was in the sagebrush and moving through the grass (those innocent eyes sparkling, an omen of travel; but who could be redeemed?), we follow the path where the branches are broken by your body, jumping from ornament to ornament, I will not go angry to the grave. It was one of the most heartbreaking things I've ever had to watch, for you were still too tiny to come home—unjustly we suffer in this desire to please—generosities for which one expects a return (or society will lose a lot of us due to death and so on? or the world will shift into neutral?) as we are to be the prison for our sins.
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