I was born on an unremarkable night in the extraordinary year of 1968. Quietly, I left my mother's uneasy womb to enter a world I feared and was not ready for, where I wailed like a frightened lamb. The light in the room where I was born was fluorescent blue. I have disliked bright light ever since.

The Chinese zodiacal and western astrological texts say that girls born at this time are as firm in their faith as the Spanish nun Theresa Davila.

Today, almost thirty years later, I see that I clearly haven't gotten beyond or been able to avoid that piercing light. Now, lying on this huge bed, I can feel the sunlight dancing back and forth on my eyelids, time turning her pages as she follows.

I used to be an angel, but angels can also become mindless demons. As they say, the road to hell may be paved with dreams of heaven.

All this requires is an age that has gone mad; when nurtured under the fierce light that shrouds them, all living cells are turned into lifeless stone.

I don't want to get up. What for? I don't have to leap out of bed and go to the office to scramble after money anymore, like so many others.

As long as I have enough to wear and eat, I have no desire to chase after money.

An odd-looking ink stain on the pillow catches my eyes as I open them. I stare at it for a long time. Suddenly, it seems as if my soul is floating around the bed examining the body on the bed from different angles. I try desperately to account for the ink blot and pull my dark spirit back into my body. In this rose-colored bedroom, on this bed where I have lived and slept alone for the past year, there has been no fluid other than the blue-black ink of my fountain pen. Under the pillow are a few sheets of paper and my pen. I like to prop myself up in bed and write or draw whatever comes into my head. It doesn't matter whether these fragments are diary entries or letters that will never be sent or that have no address; they are a record of my musings, a product of the confrontation between my inner consciousness and the outside world. They are the breath of my life.