17/02/2003 
  From the inside I could see the levels descending, one after each other. Two things in the shape of many crossed my mind. At these thoughts my hand hold in his hand held tight. I could not know anymore if I was leading or being led. If I was the childlike being who once stared at all the marvels in crystal, all them perfect imitating life and its solution death; or was I going by myself, with my long lost imaginary friend, as tall as my eyes could reach, in search of something that once I dared to find but feared the most.
     
    Those things in the shape of many were that even though all was sealed in by a transparent heaven and that you could touch the walls of this world by simply stretching your hands, all this place breathe a life I could never imagine. A life still, quiet and all the same disturbing, nervous. Without a wind to call its own, whoever created this replica world came up with a sound to replace it. A sound that never stopped, a whistle, a high sound, telling things, speaking a language I had yet to master. When this sound which was a wind touched the figures and the things of all crystal, it gave them voice. And just when you tried to tell yourself that life was more than what was trapped under this magnificent work, the voices became louder, tried to speak at you, all of them combined sounded like the world, the countries, the cities, the small lives, the everyday deaths. I could not stop listening to them.
     
    Each time we were going further down another thing struck me. The vision was not for everyone. As we started to descent, I tried to look back as much as possible to fill my head with references that would allow me to come back to my window, to my broken chair and to my life as I knew it no better. All the marvels called my sight elsewhere, with a glassy urgency. Their fragility appealed to me. It appealed to me to know nobody was going anywhere but that they were just forever there. I liked the stopped cars, the stopped smiles, the stopped smokes filling the air. I liked their stillness of an unperceived movement. Yet I tried many times to look out. And that was impossible. All I could see was transparency but nothing took shape on the other side. Nothing. Not the street I have just walked through. Not the persons I haven’t met. Not the hearts I felt pulsing upstairs in life and the ones who ceased in death.
     
    Seemed like we could only look back. Without seeing anything or anyone, we looked back at things. I wonder if they did the same.

As we descent, holding hands, a child and an elder, a leader and a follower, a seeker and a guide, I could see that the finely craved stairway was cut exemplar through the centre of the vitriol universe. On one side, interrupted, a half of it. Car crashes cut in the middle, secret kisses and caresses stopped in their illicit movement, clandestine love and hate halfway through its completion. On the other side to my front when I turn back at the other half all continues. Into and end I can not even start to dream about.

We walk for moments swallowing moments. Until we reach the bottom of the stairs. Looking up is once again difficult and the blur of a crystal sight appears once again, immaculate. Seems that with each step we are closed in. It is a divinatory route that of crystals. The past is not important. And you live the future in each of the moments. Reaching down from the last glassy step, I look down and down is my street, the crystal walk with the round blue eyes of a left alone bosom with a halfway face with a half broken morning smile; or the hands of a worker near the roofs of a town smashed by the wheels of a car and the wings of a full sized falcon. And all the other things. The floor of the shop enlarged, made world, made existence, made pulsing cold.
     
    He stops and lets me go out of his hand. The movements are slow, cold and fragile. I do not look behind. He is the immaculate blur of the glass. A last sound from the crystal wind advances through him. The words and the sense are cut halfway by an opposite voice and go up, to where I can not look back and hear back at them.

I cross the street. There is no one waving and cutting the rain in wounds and heals. I enter the house of glass and walk up the less elaborate stairway. No one to hold coldly my small, impossible hand. I walk through the door. It is open already. And the person sitting on an intact chair looks back at me even though we can never see each other.

     
  While I stand.
The rain in the outside chambers hammers down the stained glass.
Soundproof.
Soul proof.
Bullet-proof.
Windows that allow me to see the world but do not permit the world to see me.
For years I stand here and do nothing.
I do not observe.
I do not comprehend.
I do not follow.
I will not observe.
I will not comprehend.
I will not follow.
The windows are water from the outside.
The windows are ice from the inside.
I can look at everything that happens down there.
The things that happen down there can not look back.
If they were only allowed to do so they would miss me.
For I am not important.
For I am not to be seen.
For I am a secret.
Or I can not be noticed.
I am dead.
And through the looking glass.
I imitate life.