The Days of Abandonment

by Elena Ferrante

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

I felt the slab of my eyelids lower, there was no hope, the heat of the solitary night would massacre my heart.

if he no longer loved me, if I in fact no longer loved him, why should I continue to carry in my flesh so many of his attributes?

But as for me, if all the features that I had assimilated from him had once seemed to me lovable, how, now that they no longer seemed lovable, was I going to tear them out of me? How could I scrape them definitively off of my body, my mind, without finding that I had in the process scraped away myself?

the circle of an empty day is brutal, and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose.

The whole future—I thought—will be that way, life lives together with the damp odor of the land of the dead, attention with inattention, passionate leaps of the heart along with abrupt losses of meaning. But it won’t be worse than the past.

I looked at him attentively. It was really true, there was no longer anything about him that could interest me. He wasn’t even a fragment of the past, he was only a stain, like the print of a hand left years ago on a wall.

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.