Lie With Me

by Philippe Besson

Today, I’d like to slap this seventeen-year-old kid, not because of the good grades but because of his incessant need to please those who would judge him.

(“Can one assume at the same time the liberty of man and the existence of the unconscious?”),

This feeling of love, it transports me, it makes me happy. At the same time, it consumes me and makes me miserable, the way all impossible loves are miserable.

I think I love him for this loneliness, that it’s what pushed me toward him. I love his aloofness, his disengagement with the outside world. Such singularity moves me.

Nothing touches me more than cracks in the armor and the person who reveals them.

He adds this phrase, which for me is unforgettable: Because you will leave and we will stay.

Thomas Andrieu says that no one can know, everything must stay hidden. That it is the condition: take it or leave it.

At that moment, I would have followed him anywhere, done anything he asked.

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.

I should be able to stay in this state of ecstasy. Or astonishment. Or let myself be overwhelmed by the incomprehensibility of it all. But the feeling that prevails the moment he disappears is that of being abandoned. Perhaps because it is already a familiar feeling.

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

Now he feels he should speak to me, but perhaps it is only for himself, like throwing a bottle into the sea, or keeping a diary or whispering into the ground like King Midas’s barber because it’s just too much to keep to himself.

I explain that in general it’s the likelihood that actually matters more than the truth, that the feeling counts more than accuracy, and above all that a place is not a question of topography but rather the way that we describe it—not a photograph but an impression.

This passion that can’t be talked about, that has to be concealed, gives way to the terrible question: if it isn’t talked about, how can one know that it really exists?

Have you noticed how the most beautiful landscapes lose their brilliance as soon as our thoughts prevent us from seeing them properly?

I also know how much of yourself you have to leave behind in order to look like everyone else.

Desire does not go out like a match, it extinguishes slowly as it burns into ash.