"Yeah, right!" I shouted from the next room. I turned down the bed and curled up beneath the covers, soaking the sheets with my tears.

The smell of softener mixed with the gross smell of the mucus that was filling my nose. I wiped it with the palm of my hand and dried my tears. My eyes lit on the portrait of me hanging on the wall: it was done not too long ago by a Brazilian painter in Taormina. As I was walking past him, he stopped me and said, "You have such a beautiful face, let me draw you. I'll do it for free."

And while his pencil sketched lines on the sheet of paper, his eyes sparkled and smiled in place of his lips, which remained closed.

"Why do you think I have a beautiful face?" I asked him as I kept the pose.

"Because it expresses beauty, candor, innocence, spirituality," he replied, tracing broad gestures with his hands.

Beneath the covers I recalled the painter's words, as well as that morning when I lost what the old Brazilian had found so special in me. I lost it between sheets that were too cold and beneath the hands of someone who devours my very heart, which has now stopped beating. Dead. I do have a heart, Diary, even if he doesn't notice it, even if perhaps no one ever will. And before I open it, I shall give my body to any man who comes along, for two reasons: because in savoring me he might taste my rage and bitterness and therefore experience a modicum of tenderness; and because he might fall so deeply in love with my passion that he won't be able to do without it. Only then shall I give myself utterly, without hesitation, without restraint, so as not to lose the tiniest scrap of what I have always desired. I shall hold him tight within my arms and tend him like a rare and delicate flower, careful lest a gust of wind suddenly wilt him. I swear it.