Writing has been a way to save that which is no longer my reality—a sensation seizing me from head to foot, in the street—but has become “the possession,” a period of time, circumscribed and completed.

I sometimes have the feeling I’ve lost something, a little like someone who realizes he no longer has the need to smoke or to take drugs.

I have stopped seeing her in the body of every woman I encounter.

We left each other at the Métro. He was going to pick up the other woman, to go home to an apartment which I would never know, to continue to live with her, in her intimacy, the way he had lived in mine. And walking down the stairs, I repeated to myself, this is too fucked up.

It was not the erotic gestures that would bind him most to her (these happened all the time and without consequence on the beach, in the corner of an office, in rooms rented by the hour), but the baguette that he would bring home for her at lunchtime, their underwear mingled together in the laundry basket, the television show that they watched in

if he were suddenly to say “I’m leaving her and coming back to you,” after a minute of absolute happiness—of almost unbearable elation—I would feel an exhaustion, a mental depletion comparable to that of the body after orgasm, and I would wonder why I had wanted this thing.

He told me I was beautiful and that I gave excellent head.

The erotic scenes I replayed interminably at the beginning of our relationship and which I avoided thinking about now because they could not be realized, all the dreams of pleasure and happiness, had given way to a sterile and arid discourse of persuasion.

The ones to which I paid no attention at first would return at night to ravage me with meanings that were suddenly hopelessly clear.