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.

So I would not resemble the others after all. In this one regard, I would stop being the model child. I wouldn’t follow the pack. Out of instinct, I despised packs. That has never changed.

Because I’ve already understood that desire is visible.

In later years, I will often write about the unthinkable, the element of unpredictability that determines outcomes. And game-changing encounters, the unexpected juxtapositions that can shift the course of a life.

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

I discover that absence has a consistency, like the dark water of a river, like oil, some kind of sticky dirty liquid that you can struggle and perhaps drown in. It has a thickness like night, an indefinite space with no landmarks, nothing to bang against,

It was at the end of the day, at twilight—the hour we call “between a dog and a wolf.”

When the door closes, the silence is heavy enough to make your knees buckle.

how did I manage to sweep away the evidence, the undeniable certainty of the end?) I suppose I didn’t want to be overcome by grief in advance.