DAY 10

She hoped for nothing, desired nothing, except the desert, brutal and vast. And once beneath the weight of all that torturous sky, where reflections burn up before they weep, and memory dries to a calcinated crack, she touched with happiness the heart of oblivion. Let us say that for her at that moment she lost all meaning, all trust. And that her triumph  rushed from her like blood from a severed wrist. Between somewhere and nowhere she embraced her absence, which even death avoided in the cities of men. And her breath inscribed its bite on the gritty silence of stone. And her hands, twin pyres to the suicide of her eyes, turned end over end in the emptied echo of her flesh.      Let us say that the desert took her, suddenly, completely, and the emptiness it gave back does not end, will not vanish ...      Nor would she struggle to resume her life, knowing too well that the pleasure she sought and misery she found were one and the same.

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