Simple Passion

by Annie Ernaux

This delay makes it possible for me to write today, in the same way I used to lie in the scorching sun for a whole day at sixteen, or make love without contraceptives at twenty: without thinking about the consequences.

(It is a mistake therefore to compare someone writing about their own life to an exhibitionist, since the latter has only one desire: to show themselves and to be seen at the same time.)

I preferred to carry on at any cost, to let him have another woman, or even several (in other words, accepting a torment far greater than the one that made me want to leave him.)

my jealousy a sort of frail privilege

I was astonished to be accosted by men, could they not see him silhouetted inside my own body?)

I had to buy a shawl because of the bitter cold: ‘He will never see it.’

I had decided to learn his language. I kept, without washing it, a glass from which he had drunk.

Whether or not he was ‘worth it’ is of no consequence. And the fact that all this is gradually slipping away from me, as if it concerned another woman, does not change this one truth: thanks to him, I was able to approach the frontier separating me from others, to the extent of actually believing that I could sometimes cross over it.