Getting Lost

by Annie Ernaux

That’s my whole drama, I’m unable to forget the other, to be autonomous. I soak up other people’s words and actions, my body absorbs the other body.

I am the daughter of a woman who was full of desire she dared not take to its limit. But I do.

He will probably leave in a year. He says, “It will be hard.” At the beginning, I don’t quite understand but he adds: “I hope it will be hard for you too.”

I haven’t changed, I’m still that girl who believes in happiness, who waits and suffers.

It is a lovely hell, but hell nonetheless. I wonder if he, too, since Tuesday, has been afraid of what is happening between us.

It’s obvious that I’ve always invested too much imagination in men. I get lost, my self dissolves.

really wants. He can “seize the opportunity,” as in the story of Madame de La Pommeraye in Jacques le Fataliste. My whole life has been an effort

Still, I think of S much less and wonder if, obscurely, all I expect from a man is to be fertilized like a bitch and then show him my teeth.

I rewatched our home movies from ’72–73 and ’75. For the first time, I see myself as other, very different from what I am now, undeniably younger, and severe-looking. Nothing in my face speaks of happiness, especially in ’75. A “frozen woman,” indeed.

But then it wasn’t pain I felt, just desire like an arrow sure of hitting its mark. This time it was excruciating lack, a void.

I sometimes think that we’re mysteriously linked to other beings and that their death produces “waves.”

Thursday 1st Saw Too Beautiful for You. Nothing about it resembles my story and everything does. As I leave the cinema, I know it’s about me, and ordinary life and the contradictory relations between men and women.

Evening. Watched Summer of ’42. All movies are about love. I’m crying now. “I would never see her again,” said the narrator in voice-over, at the end. Always the same story. Mine too, maybe.

The question remains, what binds him to me? It isn’t just pleasure, which, in a manner of speaking, is part of the past now (therein lies the drama).

When will I catch up to the present, these lines written in the confines of passion?

I wanted to make this passion a work of art in my life, or rather this affair became a passion because I wanted it to be a work of art (Michel Foucault: the highest good is to make one’s life a work of art).

Hatred made things easier then. Now love complicates them.

This day is the juncture between past and future. It is like death. (I had the same feeling upon the death of my father and at my mother’s death too: I wrote to connect the day when I’d seen her alive with the day she died.)