Stella Maris

In the next therapy session, Alicia reflects on her perspective regarding mental health and antipsychotics, asserting that in life, one can only experience a limited degree of happiness, while despair and sadness appear boundless. She discloses the existence of another hallucination named Miss Vivian, who is perpetually crying due to her empathy for suffering babies. Miss Vivian’s influence leads Alicia to develop heightened sensitivity to the cries of infants, interpreting them as expressions of rage against the world. The conversation traverses the meaning of art, music, and, eventually, mathematics, which Alicia perceives as nothing more than sweat and toil despite its profound significance. Returning to the theme of music, she contrasts it with mathematics, describing music as self-contained and complete, while mathematics remains random and ununified. Alicia shares a childhood dream of peering into a world guarded by sentinels, beyond which lies something dreadful that she cannot discern.

The dialogue shifts to the Kid, an entity Alicia acknowledges as a guardian keeping something at bay. She recounts a high school experience in which a handsome boy wrote a message on her back, leading to a sexual awakening. The conversation revisits her father, who witnessed the first atomic bomb blasts in the New Mexican desert.