Simple Passion

by Annie Ernaux

I do not wish to explain my passion—that would imply that it was a mistake or some disorder I need to justify—I just want to describe it.

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.

It was all infinite emptiness, except when we were together making love. And even then I dreaded the moments to come, when he would be gone. I experienced pleasure like a future pain.

I reflected that there was very little difference between this reconstruction and a hallucination, between memory and madness.

As soon as I had set down my pen, I felt pangs for the man whose voice and foreign accent I could no longer hear, whose skin I could no longer touch, living an unknown life in some cold city—the real man, far more inaccessible than the written man designated by the letter A.