MY  LIFE  IS  EXPECTED  OF  ME.

            My life is expected of me. I was told I had been given it.
            I have to write; for school. What do I feel about… it doesn't matter; it's a trap. They want to know what I am like, so that they can use me. How far will they go? They were supposed to teach me to tell the truth; I am learning to lie.
            "Are you working… or dreaming?"
            Dad just went past - did he stop? -, past the open door to my room. Having justified his role as father - "I'm keeping an eye on my son's schooling" - he settled down (I listen to the noises of the house in the same way cats do) to watch a game.
            I'm dreaming.
            No, I'm not allowed to dream, I have to feed on others, on the great writers I am told to read; like a pot plant which, to grow, only has whatever is put into the earth in its pot to feed on. But without light, which no-one can transform, it dies.
            I'm dreaming. What is dreaming and what is working? The girl next to me in class has hair like baked apples. I have to write about the holidays that have just come to an end - holidays spent with family, says the title of the essay. If the hair is my cousin's it is work just to think about it, and to tell the teacher that it's none of his business. What should I have said to Dad, who has already forgotten his question?
            It's words that they expect from me in the essay. Man invented words; they're convenient for killing at a distance. How can I find a link between a word and life? I write: "I can see her hair". One's throat does not tighten at a word. I write my name, my class, the date: what can my mind add to that?
            Do I have to write the essay so as to become a writer or so as to learn how to fill in questionnaires? "Do you agree to be a slave?" Who ever would answer "Yes" to such a question? But who would be surprised to be kicked out of school for not having been obedient?
            Where is the magic mirror that tells the princess who is the fairest of them all? "Mirror, mirror, tell me who I am!" The mirror shows me who is behind me. Men; and they reply: "We say you are…", but who are they themselves?
            One day, I asked the girl next to me: "Is your hair your mask?" She laughed, I could see her teeth. I know the men in the mirror, they are here in the classroom, they talk to me, they tell me... I should listen to them but I can only hear their mask.
            They shouldn't have told me about Greek tragedy and then told me to be good.
            In class, so as not to speak, the girl next to me writes what she thinks. I heard whispers: "They've got secrets!" Does that mean she writes only for me? Of course it's for me. If someone else were to read the note, all they'd see is words.
            And yet one day someone did take one of the notes. He showed it to his friends; a group formed in the yard. I could hear them laughing, tittering, talking perhaps. "It's very beautiful", said the note; it was referring to a piece of music. The comments were excited. So it was possible to get sense out of words that had no meaning. What the girl next to me had written did not exist; the only thing that existed was the group doing what groups do. Was it a spark of interest or just a desire to mock me that caused one of the boys to ask me a little later: "What do you find very beautiful, then?" I said: "Finding someone capable of reading what's written". I started thinking about the group that would want to decide my life by reading my essay.
            Am I the only one to dream? But I'm not dreaming. I think about what is around me, without anything moving in my head; it's just a look. In a dream, images appear, shift, change, something flies, time perhaps...