Lie With Me

by Philippe Besson

I concluded with an aching finality that the could-happen possibilities were gone, that doing whatever you wanted whenever you wanted was over. The future didn’t exist anymore. Everything was in the past and would stay there.

I haven’t forgotten. I came from this childhood.

I think of it as the perfect little crack in an extraordinarily brief window of opportunity.

The desire for constant movement will come after, the impossibility of staying in one place, the hatred of the roots that hold you there, Doesn’t matter where you go, just change the scenery, says the lyric to a song.

We know nothing of the grand decimation that will follow, depriving us of our best friends and old lovers, that will bring us together in cemeteries and cause us to scratch out names in our address books, enraging us with so many absences, such profound loss. It is there but we aren’t afraid yet. We believe that we are protected by our youth. We are seventeen years old. You don’t die when you are seventeen years old.

In the end, love was only possible because he saw me not as who I was, but as the person I would become.