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Memory is a strange voice in the back of my mind, with ups and downs, some slow, some abrupt. Sometimes the voice is deafening with painful screams that stab my soul, other times I am barely able to recognize it, weak and feeble as a breath of wind, echoing what passes almost unnoticed from one generation to another and remembered the following years.

Older memories are like Saturn's rings, surrounding a continuous layer, thickening with each memory of every life, flowing forever in history, layer after layer, like a carpet of dead leaves, fallen in late autumn.

I imagine memory as a huge mirror in which can be seen intact faces from the past, present and future.

Every morning I look in the mirror and see all that I fear staring me in the face. I start a new day, obsessed and desperate to see how time went around me.

I sometimes am paralyzed with fear failing any attempt for action. In those strange moments, I almost always go back in the past and start dreaming.

In adolescence, especially on vacations, I always meant to do a lot of things but every time I sat down on the carpet instead and began daydreaming, starting in the morning light, and ending when the last rays of sun covered the room in a bluish hue. When I awoke from my dream state, it looked like nothing around me was recognizable. In those moments, I thought that although the day had passed, the dream was more important than anything I have meant to do.

At some point, I gave up explaining them to others.

Small fragments snatched of a life lived intensely make up the memory. Shining fragments like shards of colored glass, some dark - evil – others like the windows of a church, with nameless angels, some brighter than others.

I look in the mirror now. There have been more than twenty years since I was a dreamy kid. Wrinkles outline my face and like a blind man, I try to convince myself that the mirror image is mine. My fingers with long bones, the eyes, mouth, hair, are all outlined in an unknown and frightening way while my mind refuses to recognize them.

When I was Sylvia Plath age, when she took her final decision it was difficult to look at myself as an old woman but I identified with her. I felt so close to her, her sensibility mysterious and painful. Back then, years felt passing like days, and days like seconds

I feel I survived middle age only through pages written at night when everybody was asleep.

I constantly cheated fatigue with a cup of tea, while the steam above the tea cup formed figures in the pale lamps light living only a brief second, as I wrote the long. awaited page and disappearing completely in the morning light that covered every movement, every atom of life around, taking their dark mist and last thought with which they woke my memory .