Simple Passion

by Annie Ernaux

I would have liked to have done nothing else but wait for him. I lived with the growing obsession that something might happen to stop us from meeting.

I didn’t want my mind to concentrate on anything else but the wait itself, in order not to spoil it.

As in the past, when the longer I waited after taking an exam the more I became convinced I had failed, so now, as the days went by without him ringing, I was certain he had left me.

From the very beginning, and throughout the whole of our affair, I had the privilege of knowing what we all find out in the end: the man we love is a complete stranger.

Sometimes I told myself that he might spend a whole day without even thinking about me. I imagined him getting up, drinking his coffee, talking, and laughing, as if I didn’t exist.

I was always calculating, “it’s two weeks, five weeks since he left” or “last year, around this time, I was there, I was doing that.”

Yet I went on living. In other words, the act of writing didn’t lessen my grief.

All I have done is translate into words—words he will probably never read; they are not intended for him—the way in which his existence has affected my life. An offering of a sort, bequeathed to others.