The Days of Abandonment

by Elena Ferrante

I thought that as I was calculatedly demonstrating to him all my virtues of a woman in love and therefore ready to sustain him in his obscure crisis, so he was calculatedly trying to disgust me, to push me to say to him: get out, you make me sick, I can’t stand you anymore.

Cultured women, in comfortable circumstances, they broke like knickknacks in the hands of their straying men.

It seemed to me incredible that all of a sudden he had become uninterested in my life, like a plant watered for years that is abruptly allowed to die of drought.

I found myself alone and frightened by my own desperation.

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