She had been wondering for a long time what was wrong with her. Everything was wrong about her, she found out eventually. From the curls of her hair to the excess fat in her belly, and the dull brown of her eyes, and the rash way she had of dealing with people, and the brief period of time it took her to get irritated, even mad at people. Everything about her irritated /her/. And the fact that other people didn't quite agree with her irritated her as well. For how come someone obviously easy to dislike like herself wasn't generally disliked by people around her? Most people did like her, in fact, and she found that rather odd, since she didn't like herself. She kept considering if people weren't making fun of her, mocking her, pulling her leg. She was quite sure that people laughed at her all the time. What was worse, she was quite sure that they pitied her. Because she was such a useless piece of crap, such a poor, chubby girl with no one to keep her company.

          She scared people. She knew she did; she couldn't help it. She could remember a huge number of occasions when people had stared at her and left immediately, and others when they actually came to her and told her she was scary, why was she always frowning, why didn't she smile more often? She wasn't aware of her constant frowning until her first year at the hospital, when one of the patients in her ward, an old lady with a mouth as dirty as a truck driver's, insisted on rubbing her forehead with a bony finger, 'Don't do that, young lady!'.

          She took to hiding herself. She was ashamed of herself, and of the things she did, everything, even the little things she was sure nobody paid attention to. She thought that /someone/ might be looking, and even when she was sure that nobody was looking, she was still ashamed of her before herself. She knew it was stupid, but she couldn't help it. She couldn't forgive herself, never. Little things she had done years before, little wrong but harmless things that every kid does, those things kept nagging at her mind forever, and she felt that deep stone inside herself, that burden called guilt, and also that painful one called regret, whenever she thought of them. She was still ashamed of those things, even after so much time. She felt stupid, and silly, and unloved.

          She -was- unloved. She was 21, and still didn't know how to deal with the questions that always arose, concealed behind friendly smiles and joking winks, though she knew quite well how the word 'weirdo' flashed on her relatives' and friends' foreheads when they asked her. "So... Where is your boyfriend?" Oh, how she longed to say "I don't have a boyfriend -at the moment-" instead. But she couldn't, because she'd never had one, she didn't know what it was like. So they asked back, always the same words. "Oh, come on, you're hiding him from us!" At that point she usually gave them a faint, painful smile and walked away. No one could quite comprehend how painful those little dialogues were. They hurt her inside, they kept hurting for many hours, many days sometimes, and she had to swallow back her tears, and that only caused more pain. Such an unhappy creature, she was. And yet she felt she had no right to feel that way. She had most of the things she wanted, after all. She went to a good school, she had a TV set in her room, she'd never been hungry, she had a new computer. She wasn't worthy of all that, actually, she didn't deserve them. She didn't deserve anything. But she had nobody with whom to share those things she had. She wanted to share things; that was all she wanted actually. She couldn't begin to imagine why anyone would like to take whatever it was that she had to offer, but she would like to do it anyway. She /needed/ it. She had so much to give, so much stored inside her. Nobody wanted it, though. Nobody gave a damn. Some people listened, but they did nothing with what she gave them, it changed nothing inside them, it didn't move them, it didn't touch them. She thought that perhaps they didn't understand her. It was her fault, really; she was far more complex than she wished to be. It was unhealthy. And it did hurt her, too. Most things hurt her, quite deeply. Like a knife that twisted inside her, the old metaphor. Or like a little creature that ate her liver during the day, only for it to recover itself at night, like Prometeus. Only she wasn't sure what it was that she had done wrong - that is, apart from everything. She felt truly guilty all the time, for the little things, but she knew there was something else. There *must* be something else. Something big that she couldn't point a finger at. The more she thought about it, the more it made her feel stupid. And yet she couldn't help it, she couldn't, never. And it hurt her so. Oh God, it hurt her so... At those times she would try to reach out to someone, but would find only emptiness. She knew she should go out and try to find someone real, but she knew she would fail, she knew no one would want her. She had tried it before, she believed. She could swear she had. Not in the right way, probably; she never did things right anyway. So she stopped trying. She stopped altogether; it was very tiring, to try, and not to make it. So she started to do things only when asked. She went out only when needed. The whole world scared her, because it was a whole world of possibilities. Too many chances to do things wrong, the only way she knew how to do things. So she didn't face the world. She kept her fears to herself, felt ashamed of them, felt guilty for feeling them, but she couldn't face them. Honestly, she couldn't.

          Eventually, she turned into a vegetable. No joy in a vegetable life. But then, no fear either. She turned into what she had always been... useless, like a 70% water-made leaf of lettuce. Only she wasn't green.

          CPPII, Engenho de Dentro, Rio de Janeiro. 10 de março de 1999.