The house was full of them.

On the balcony, the Swedish girl from the next room. Reviewing articles on Foucault. The redheads sleeping on the stairs – among the plants – no one knew how they got there.

The one on the ground floor, the tallest. She would wait for me every night at the kitchen, telling me how to dream without dwindling. 

There was a constant noise.

Except for Fridays, when someone brought the mirrors to the living room, played techno.

The rest of us laughed on the floor. Face down or kneeling. Hysterical laughter could be heard from the street.

Meanwhile, my mother marched around the block, around and around the block, making a fuss.

‘Daughter, this can’t be, it just can’t be, it just can’t be’.

Until one or the other, the Swedish or the smartest said ‘enough’ and entered the room with the jar of sleeping pills.

In the hall, the blonde one always played the violin.

‘Adagio for Strings’, on repeat.

The house was like a bazaar,

— a noisy, crowded place.

We were seven or six or ten, I don’t know. Sometimes I would count them, give them names and soon forget again.

I wonder how long I spent there.

Now I’m twenty, now I’m thirty, now twenty-two. I spent more than ten years — at least — in that image.

I sense it because, towards the end, I could see the peeling walls through the shower water. And the eggs, rotting in the back of the cabinet. Also, the sink was full of broken dishes and, we were all in excruciating pain. All the same pain in the clavicle.

One of them, I remember, would sink my thumbs into the exact point of my pain until I laid down.

While the tall one grabbed me by the hair and dragged my forehead against the floor. She told me - concerned - something that I already knew:

‘Existing was this, turning the pain upside down, together with the time, against the music that no longer reaches you, by the cabinet of the rotting eggs’.