—SOMETIMES IT BE LIKE THAT

 

GETTING LOST    /    Annie Ernaux, final part 

 

 

Destiny is hazy.

 

Nothing about it resembles my story and yet everything does.

 

So, I imagine, imagine, over and over again.

 

Ah, if only the sun could shine tonight.

 

It was only the breath that made me think of love, not the face.

 

When will I see things with more distance?

 

What we have here is nothing more that the erosion of desire over time.

 

All movies are about love. Always the same story.

 

In other words, I’m in that hollow place where death, writing and sex merge, and I see the link between them but am unable to surmount it.

 

Now I know that waiting never leads to anything but disaster.

 

I’m just giving up passion in order to write.

 

On waking I thought: “a bed of suffering.” I am worthless—what am I doing, what am I bringing to the world right now?

 

It’s obvious that nothing is more desirable or dangerous than losing the sense of self.

 

I’ve grown used to wasting my time without fear or guilt.

 

Why doesn’t it make me happy?

 

Of course, the appetite for knowledge, that is, for destruction, had to rear its head like an old demon.

 

Do I live differently because I write? Yes, I think so, even in the depths of pain. But not always: that’s the whole drama.

 

Whatever the case, it is still a beautiful story.

 

His long kisses, after he comes in my mouth.

 

Some women say the male body is ugly. I don’t understand them.

 

Now that I know, the smell no longer bothers me. Knowledge is always liberating.

 

I’ve been a character from a novel right from the start.

 

Why do I always imagine the worst, I am forever the abandoned child.

 

It’s not over yet, there are still things to be experienced.

 

But going to the ends of misery first means going to the ends of happiness.

 

The horror is in the not knowing.

 

The only way to end things without too much suffering is to make it a ceremony.

 

He said, “Annie, I love you,” and I didn’t attach much importance to it because it was during sex, but perhaps that is precisely where the truth, the only truth, resides: in desire.

 

Shame spreads over everything, prevents any further progress.

 

What else is there to do when you don’t write? Eat, drink, make love

 

I’m entering into a state of suffering, seeking to forget to survive.

 

But then what is there to write that is true and fair?

 

I was playing the role of an “extra” in my own life for an entire year.

 

I have to learn how to forget.

 

Again, what do I do with so much beauty?

 

Dying of not dying: the first time I understand these words.

 

The worst part is continuing to wait when there’s no longer anything to wait for.

 

All I see is passion stripped of will.

 

I’m no longer sure that freedom exists in writing. I even wonder if writing isn’t the domain of greater alienation. In which the past and the horror of lived experience return. But on the other hand, the result, a book, can function as a means of freedom for others.

 

There is this need I have to write something that puts me in danger, like a cellar door that opens and must be entered, come what may.

 

Now all I want from a man is love, that is, the thing which most resembles writing—the loss of self, the experience of emptiness being filled.

 

Still, I know I’ll have to decide to write one thing and not another, to stop wavering.