I'm losing my taste for everything, including even my taste for finding everything tasteless. - Fernando Pessoa

Every gesture is a dead dream.

That is how I experience life, as apocalypse and cataclysm. Each day brings an increasing inability in myself to make the smallest gesture, even to imagine myself confronting clear, real situations. The presence of others — always such an unexpected event for the soul — grows daily more painful and distressing. Talking to others makes me shudder. If they show any interest in me, I flee. If they look at me, I tremble. I am constantly on the defensive. Life and other people bruise me. I can't look reality in the eye.

...And suddenly, from behind me, I hear the metaphysically abrupt arrival of the office boy. I feel like I could kill him for barging in on what I wasn't thinking. I turn around and look at him with a silence full of hatred, tense with latent homicide, my mind already hearing the voice he'll use to tell me something or other. He smiles from the other side of the room and says 'Good afternoon' in a loud voice. I hate him like the universe. My eyes are sore from imagining.