As I await my fortieth birthday in a few days, what can I tell myself about what I have done with my life? I need to sort out my feelings and organize my thoughts. I feel a stifling emptiness. A void filling the heart and entrails, a weak pulse in the soul, a chaos in the brain, in the stubborn head cut from the rock as Mama describes it. Memories are intertwined, I am unable to connect two thoughts or feelings. A complete dullness of the mind. I want to speak, to talk to my friend, to scream as I did before on the stage of the Bella Regia Theater. I cannot. The tongue is heavy. The body’s battery is empty of any charge. Laxity in all the organs, everything is inoperative, desolate, and terrifying. How will I enter forty with a soul empty?