(The end is coming, it’s arriving with the cold that has settled in definitively, even in that city where it’s hardly ever cold, and with the workers who maybe—just maybe—are starting to get suspicious. Soon wears her down coat and doesn’t intend to take it off all day long, and brings a fleece sweatshirt that she sits on to wait for her friend. Haste, or need, is coming to a boil inside her, the need to force a denouement in keeping with her rebellion, so blind and unproductive. Or maybe she simply confuses things, mixes up what is expected, what is feared, and what is presupposed, so that it fits with what is, which has no name. She collects ambiguous moments, reads into them with her sick and neurotic gaze. Men cannot be friends with girls, she’s always been told that, and even more: it’s impossible for an old man to make friends with a young girl. An old man deceives, has hidden intentions—dirty intentions. That is the natural thing, not the opposite, and what they say generally about old men is also applicable to Old Man, to the actual Old Man, her Old Man, thus sweeping away all his particularities and exceptions. To top it all off Old Man is very strange, he doesn’t do anything, doesn’t work, he wears binoculars everywhere he goes, he spends all his time reading about birds and pouring over the lyrics of Nina Simone songs. Old Man had a father-grandfather and a mother who wouldn’t look at him; they locked him in a clinic where they had to tie him down and medicate him so he wouldn’t attack anyone; Old Man only has two suits, one for summer and another for winter, and when he takes them to the cleaners he wears clothes he got from a friend who killed himself. She intuits that Old Man is poor, but she loves to imagine him as a rich old man; she intuits that he is harmless, but if she wants to get somewhere with this, she has to imagine him as dangerous. She can’t end up without a story to tell. She needs a story to tell.

She writes in her diary: sometimes a line, but other times several pages, paragraphs and paragraphs about her invented life, a life where no one calls her marshmallow, where Marga isn’t a classmate who bullies her, where her brother isn’t the brother who left, where her brother’s friend never referred to her as poor thing, and Old Man is not the Old Man who has just come through the shrubbery and looked up through his binoculars, wrinkling his eyes, trying to identify exactly what kind of parakeet it is that has landed on the Siberian elm’s highest branch.)