Kindle Notes & Highlights
(And when you’ve been hurt once, you’re afraid to try again later, in dread of enduring the same pain. You avoid getting hurt in an attempt to avoid suffering: for years, this principle will serve as my holy sacrament. So many lost years.)
I suppose I didn’t want to be overcome by grief in advance.
Later I will do the same with death. I will behave as if life will just continue.
I understand that something terrible has happened.
I said she had simply decided not to go on. At that age I knew nothing about death, let alone suicide, but that’s the phrase that came to me. I was told to be quiet.
Resentment took over, and time did the rest.
I think: In the end, he remained hidden all his life. In spite of the great departure, the ambitious effort to forge a new existence, he fell back into all the same traps: shame, the impossibility of sharing a love that endures.
Philippe, I’m going to Spain and I’m not coming back, at least not right away. You are going to Bordeaux and I know it will be only the first step in a long journey. I always knew you were made for somewhere else. Our paths are separating. I know you would have liked for things to be different, for me to say the words that would have reassured you, but I could not, and I never knew how to talk anyway. In the end, I tell myself that you understood. It was love, of course. And tomorrow, there will be a great emptiness. But we could not continue—you have your life waiting for you, and I will
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