REM
“Who are you? Where do you come from?” were the questions you wanted to ask her right away. She wouldn’t have been able to answer, so identified was she with her mystery, so reluctant to betray it. No one will ever know how she managed to breathe — by what aberration she yielded to the claims of breath — nor what she was seeking among us. The one sure thing is that she was not from here, and that if she shared our fallen state it was merely out of politeness or some morbid curiosity. Only angels and incurables inspire a sentiment analogous to the one you felt in her presence. Fascination, supernatural malaise! The first moment I saw her, I fell in love with her timidity, a unique, unforgettable timidity that gave her the appearance of a vestal exhausted in the service of a secret god, or else of a mystic ravaged by the nostalgia or the abuse of ecstasy, forever unfit to reinstate the surfaces of life!