The skin is usually tender, and with those unique features I know I will not find in any other woman. Starting with the face is extremely comfortable. At first, I go softly and gently; exerting pressure only in the places where I know it will make a difference. It becomes less comfortable though when I finish and realize I have a long way to go.

Ten years from now it was easy. It was simply a matter of waking up at five o'clock in the morning, when every one in the family was sleeping and washing my clothes. It was easy then when, it was merely a matter of falling into the act of fastening a bolt, washing my teeth, or conversation. Then it was myself engulfed in the words I spoke. It was myself contained within each syllable of each word. Listening to the sound my feet made when touching the ground, or just being still and in solitude when I needed it the most. It was easy then, I say, but the truth is that even then it was difficult to do. I look back, and I feel I was pure then. Perhaps I think: so, because I was young. Too young to have been sleeping around the way I do now. Young and in a world of fantasy and magic where being in heaven was only a matter of looking up at the sky. But at the same time a part of me was already wrapped within madness. Madness about my mother and how I waited for her attention with unimagined patience. Expecting that some day she would with her tenderness and care rescue me from emptiness; when in fact only by the weight of my absence could I prove to her that I existed, and so madness grew inside of me; so I absence myself in many ways. Once I took a bus with no place in mind in which to arrive, wondering around the city for hours. I was seven. That was the first time I took a bus by myself. I also slept up on the roof several times (of course thats when it rained, I paid the consequences). I became insane and obsessed for my mother. I wanted to be part of her beauty, her warmth, her sweetness; I wanted to absorb every drop of attention out of her time. It couldn't be so. Then I became insane with the fastening of a bolt. I understood that was all I had.

But just as insane then as I am now. Still, I feel there are many attractive things about me. Maybe that's the only thing in, which the man in Dostoyevsky's "Notes from the Underground" and I differ: (" I'm a sick man... a mean man. There's nothing attractive about me. I think there's something wrong with my liver.." 48). My liver is in good condition, I think, but my wisdom teeth are coming in and I'm ready to take them out at any moment.

Ten years from now I thought I was close to what I wanted: I was close to refinement and to those timeless moments I long for not to forget. I was close then, when in my family's and friend's company, I felt invaded by cozy places to inhabit; and most important of all: I was capable of inhabiting myself. But still, I was as miserable as I am now, and I was not born in st. Petersburg! I was born in Pereira, a beautiful small city in the middle of a South American country, Colombia. It is a place where it never rains and where there are water falls and green mountains all over. I was the best in my class; president of the literary academy and part of the volleyball team of the school, but even then it wasn't enough. And now like Dostoyevsky I ask myself: "Why, just when I was most capable of being conscious of every refinement of the 'good and bad,' as they used to put it once upon a time, were the moments when I lost my awareness of it, and did such ugly things--things every body does probably, but that I did precisely at moments when I was most aware that they shouldn't be done,"(94).

When I proceed, closer to the breasts, she always feels as if something is invading a sacred place: despite the roundness of her body, her legs and her hips, despite her fresh peach scent. Nothing else matters as much as her breasts; I don't blame them when they consider the breasts as unique. I used to think also that my breasts were the most special part of my body I could give to a man, but as you grow older you find out they don't think the same. But being disappointed by a man's reaction to your own expectations is nothing compared with my father's reaction when he knew that I had had sex for the first time. It was worse than if I was being driven out of a castle like Candide in Voltaire’s novel. I was forced to marry someone I did not love! I guess that's what happens when you feel the need of showing people how unique you consider your breasts.

Once in the stomach, going around the belly with my warm hands, that is the time when I start to feel guilty. Within myself I'm thinking:" I have to write a paper for my World Humanities class..." It is not like when I was in Colombia: then, I used to vibrate with everything I did and I used to be completely in the place that I was, with all my senses and soul. I had a journey every time my mother cooked my favorite of her dishes; steak with pineapple and raisins over vegetables. The steak was healthier, the pineapple juicer, the raisins sweeter and the vegetables were never as fresh. All because of my appetite to really tasted what was there for me, especially my mother's dishes. Now both my appetite and my mother are hard to reach. Look at me now: thinking about my paper while going through the stomach! How mediocre! Maybe I have the same superficiality as Mrs.Bennet, or Lydia in the novel by Jane Austin, "Pride and prejudice."

Poor legs, they are always overlooked, there is where I intend to get really deep. I confess the pleasure I get when I hear people moaning. Not the kind I make, though. Me, always moaning about something: that I have a project due and I'm behind, that if I listen to the word math I feel like jumping out of the window. I haven’t been in my math class for a month because I can't wake up at 8:00 a.m. for it! And I have to pass it to go into third year! And that if I don't go into third year, there may not be third year at all a year from now! With all these budget cuts, soon we will have no school of architecture at City! Also doing my portfolio to go into the third year; third year, third year everything lately has to do with the third year. Maybe that's why they say it is the toughest year in Architecture. A portfolio I haven't started to do! In my history class I haven't read a thing and I have a C in the class. I have been looking for a place to crawl just to have some privacy for over seven months and I'm ready to go crazy! There is another student in architecture I really like, but even though we've slept together he doesn't give a damn thing about it! I get out from work, and on top of being tired and wanting to get home early, there is a long line to buy tokens to take the subway because what; one dollar fifty a token? One more reason to feel that an anonymous entity is trying from every direction to destroy our lives. It would be more honest and practical if instead they would drop the atomic bomb again, in the city, and stop playing those silly games like bureaucracy! Yes, an anonymous entity, always against the people! Always against those who have no political or economical power, always against those who work hard to at least have a decent life, always against those who make this country go on. Once in the subway car, I look at the shoes that the old woman with her hands full of plastic bags is wearing. She is wearing a pair of sneakers, a pair of sneakers with untied laces. Then I trip when I see the untied laces of her sneakers! I imagine her job probably in a factory, and her poor children waiting for food or maybe just waiting for her. Her husband! Mad at her because she is too tired to make love. Then I look at her face without realizing that tears are rolling down my cheek. I look around again trying to hide myself from shame. Suddenly, I have to condemn myself to listen to the homeless. They are always begging for money, and then, listening to their creepy voices when singing in order to earn it. I think about my design professor that I feel, doesn't like me. I think again how can I blame him, if I don't do any work.

The feet are the most mistreated part of the body, they carry so much weight and we never pay good attention to them. I do; the key is to go with the toes first, with cream and a really warm hand, they can't resist that. Who wouldn't want a warm hand in any part of our body or any part of our soul when we are running from one place to another, from one role to another. We never have enough time for such things. Now, time is a persecutor that drags us with anxiety. No one cares how things are done, People just want "things done" and of course we are always questioning ourselves. Questioning what will we be doing, or what we have done, or better yet, what are we doing; as if the time of the question would give us an excuse to justify the done from the undone. The question was never of WHAT would be done, but HOW it would be done. "I will admit that reason is a good thing; no argument about that, but reason is only reason, and it only satisfies man's rational requirements"(112 Notes from the underground") Maybe because it is a muscle we assume it is not sensitive, but calves when touched with only the tip of the fingers, in the sides, gentle, in deep circles, can make people experience that kind of pleasure-pain, you want to stop, and not stop at the same time. Is it that kind of pleasure that makes people see heaven...or hell?

It happens also when you use this other tool to gain people's attention: you pretend you are the victim, always moaning about silly things, and feeling self-pity. There is this sense of pain, sorrow and despair at the time that you experience the pleasure of finding out how people care about you; you are not alone in this world, like you thought when your parents got divorced. It was an agony; it was like a womb splitting a part. After that, everything that happened, you blamed it on your parent's separation. I admit it was not an easy thing to admit but please! You are a woman now! Even though some may say that at twenty four you are too old to be a teenager and too young to be a woman. But the truth is that no matter how mature or self-sufficient we may think we are, we will always be sensitive to human touch.

Some times people don't expect it, perhaps because it would be: "too good to be true" but doing the buttocks is when I start to sweat. The harder I go the better, and a special round circles on the sides is enough for them to go crazy, at this point they most of the time moan loud. Maybe as the man from Notes from the Underground says: "how monstrously ungrateful man is." I'm also ungrateful. Maybe I should be grateful of at least being in school and like Marcela says (my roommate and also my uncle's" ex girlfriend) I also should be grateful about having a roof under which I can put my head. But listening to those two it goes beyond human patience! One minute they say,( my uncle and his ex girlfriend) they don't want anything to do with each other, and the next minute, I find them caressing each other. Who's listening to their complaints? Who is in the middle of everything? Of course me! Despite the fact that I try my best not to eat or be at home at all! That I sleep on the sofa in the living room (if there is one) and pay rent! On top of everything I'm always the irresponsible one!

"Then there's something else. Why, one may ask, do I want to write at all? If it's not for the public, couldn't I just reminisce in my head, without putting things down on paper? That's a good question, but I feel that writing will lend dignity to it. There is something impressive about the written word; it is more conducive to self­ examination, and my confession will have more style." ("Notes from the Underground." 123.) I don't mind having a style! On the contrary, by writing about it, I feel I am giving away the last piece of dignity I hardly was holding on to. It is like playing the last card of your game, risking everything you've worked for, not caring if you will win or lose. That is rather cheap. When I was twelve I almost committed suicide because I had lost it. I had lost that kind of spiritual ecstasy in which you experience an instance of eternity by seeing a butterfly dance or an autumn tree leaf fall. Unfortunately my aunt got there just in time. It was shame what I felt at still being alive and simply not vibrating with the fastening of a bolt, or washing the dishes. This is my last card and I might die tomorrow when my math teacher tell me I am being dropped from the course, but at this point I just do not care. "I had nothing to turn to, for there was nothing in my surroundings that I could look to or that attracted me. I was sick of everything and longed to contradict and oppose. So I abandoned myself to dissipation" (Notes from the Underground." 129), I didn't abandon myself to dissipation then, but I'm doing it now.

The back is the part of the body they always long for the most. I can understand why, anybody could. Here is when I start to enjoy the idea of being done. Here is when I feel I'm almost there! I also sweat a lot here. I t is worth it though, when listening to the cracking of the spine they love and enjoy so much!

It is almost as if the sound of it would make something we expect to happen become real. It is not an expectation, or an idea anymore; because we can hear the sound of it. Like putting things in writing, I don't materialize my ideas, expectations, feelings, questions, illusions, or confusions by hearing them, but I concrete them by seeing them on paper. Only for me, instead of dignifying things, it is like a catharsis, like an exorcising of the evils I have inside. At this point, dignity had been stepped on way too much.

When I reach the neck and head I know I'm done. Hard pressure in the scalp is something almost unexpected but it works so well, that sometimes they ask for more. There is where the brain is, and I'm thinking: do I have brains? Is all this a real catharsis or rather one more of the traps I fall into? It is just hard to keep up with everything at the same time! Student of architecture and everything that it implies: staying up all night long without any sleep at all, some times even days; being a waitress, lover, daughter (actually that is something I'm not, my parents just don't know much about me) girlfriend, and now with this new idea of becoming a fire woman, and, and, wait! I'm done! She looks up; her eyes are always bright, with a smile on her face and most of the time with a strong desire for a good night sleep. I t always amazes me of how much the face changes after such an experience. I always wonder if they would really go to heaven while experiencing it. They become brighter, calmer, happier and with a intangible corporal awareness. It is a metamorphosis. The same I suffer when I drag all the devils from inside away. Then, I end up exhausted by the battle that has just occurred. The calm and silence come in, and I am capable of seeing things I could not see before, of feeling things I could not feel before.