Can you hear the drums Fernando?
The slow, pounding sounds of my heart
As it transcends the circles of time
To find that nothing has changed

Whatever the case, it would have been better not to be born,
For no matter how interesting it is at every moment,
Life sometimes hurts, jades, cuts, bruises, grates,
Makes us want to scream, to jump, to wallow, to walk
Out of every house and every logic and off every balcony,
And to become savage and die among trees and things forgotten,
Among collapses and hazards and absence of tomorrows,
And all this, O life, should be something closer to what I think,
To what I think or what I feel, whatever that is.

I cross my arms on the table, I lay my head on my arms,
And I need to want to cry, but I don't know where to find the tears.
No matter how hard I try to pity myself, I don't cry,
My soul is broken under the curved finger that touches it . . .
What will become of me? What will become of me?

The feelings that hurt most,
the emotions that sting most,
are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things,
precisely because they are impossible;
nostalgia for what never was;
the desire for what could have been;
regret over not being someone else;
dissatisfaction with the world’s existence.
All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape,
an eternal sunset of what we are.

There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street. There are images tucked away in books that live more vividly than many men and women. There are phrases from literary works that have a positively human personality. There are passages from my own writing that chill me with fright, so distinctly do I feel them as people, so sharply outlined do they appear against the walls of my room, at night, in shadows….. I've written sentences whose sound, read out loud or silently (impossible to hide their sound), can only be of something that acquired absolute exteriority and a full-fledged soul

To say! To know how to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image! This is all that matters in life; the rest is men and women, imagined loves and factitious vanities, the wiles of our digestion and forgetfulness, people squirming — like worms when a rock is lifted — under the huge abstract boulder of the meaningless blue sky.

Trying to assemble a completely blank jigsaw puzzle, I am torn - am I missing a piece or is this just a naturally difficult puzzle to solve?