The Days of Abandonment

by Elena Ferrante

what happens when, overflowing with love, you are no longer loved,

In those long hours I was the sentinel of grief, keeping watch along with a crowd of dead words.

Women without love lose the light in their eyes, women without love die while they are still alive.

I was a bundle of nerves and wanted to avoid any occasion for conflict.

Yes, I said to myself, we do, we imagine, even as adults, a lot of silly things, out of joy or exhaustion.

A woman can easily kill on the street, in the middle of a crowd, she can do it more easily than a man. Her violence seems a game, a parody, an improper and slightly ridiculous use of the male intent to do harm.

We don’t know anything about people, even those with whom we share everything.

Mario must have imagined her as the future, and yet he desired the past, the girlhood that I had already given him and that he now felt nostalgia for.

I wanted him to love my body forgetful of what one knows of bodies. Beauty, I thought anxiously, is this forgetfulness.

music is always soothing, it loosens the knots of nerves tied tight around the emotions.

Existence is this, I thought, a start of joy, a stab of pain, an intense pleasure, veins that pulse under the skin, there is no other truth to tell.