Getting Lost

by Annie Ernaux

Sometimes I can picture his face, but only fleetingly. There, now, I’ve lost it again. I know his eyes, the shape of his lips, his teeth, but they do not form a whole. Only his body is identifiable—his hands, not yet. I am consumed with desire, to the point of tears.

My mouth, face, and sex are ravaged. I don’t make love like a writer, that is, in a removed way, or while thinking, “I can use this in a book.” I always make love as if it were the last time (and who’s to say it isn’t?), simply as a living being.

It occurred to me that I hadn’t asked his wife’s name (a subtle form of jealousy, or the desire to annihilate the other woman).

I really ask myself, must I continue to live this way, between expectation and chagrin, apathy and desire? Complete similarity between my behavior at the time of my mother’s death and now: I’m always doing something for him (as I did then for her). I’m going out to buy vodka now, and maybe a short, tight-fitting “fashionable” skirt (especially since I know his wife doesn’t wear that kind of skirt). It is a lovely hell, but hell nonetheless. I wonder if he, too, since Tuesday, has been afraid of what is happening between us.

Perhaps what most keeps me attached to S is my failure to understand his behavior.

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

There is a time in a love affair when you run—everything still lies ahead, full of hope—and another time when everything tumbles into the past and what lies ahead will never be anything but repetition and decline.

He called at five thirty. Something falls afterwards, like a curtain on the piece of theater I’ve been playing in my imagination for days. The (calm) waiting begins, the fear, too, of seeing his indifference, boredom, the less desire—the last time was so beautiful. Yet the absurdity of this liaison, its “contingency,” is so obvious. What binds us to each other? For me, it’s emptiness, I know. And for him?

The words and tears that I repress, my eternally smooth and smiling face, my constant tenderness become unbearable to me over time.

Evening. He called, sounding very “normal.” My imaginary constructions collapse. I feel sleepy. I don’t want to break up, not until the next time . . . But how am I to believe that people can love me, become attached to me? It’s as if only my parents could possibly have done so.

For the first time, yesterday, we found a perfect common rhythm. I’d never found it with anyone before.

This morning, while driving through the streets, I could not stop crying, as when my mother died, or after I had the abortion, walking in the streets of Rouen. It is the main arc, the unifying thread of my life’s secret meaning. The same loss, not yet fully elucidated, which only writing can truly elucidate.

I always think I’ve reached the final limit of pain and then it turns out not to be true. Twice during the night I wake up and weep with such anguish that I think my heart is going to explode.

I hoped to grow more “beautiful,” cultivated, and self-assured in another year, or two or three years (and it happened). Now I can only grow more withered and flabby. All I can hope for is to write more “beautiful” books, obtain more “glory.” From where I stand today, this prospect has no sparkle.

I’ve really said goodbye to the dream of an intelligent, “solid” (etc.) man with whom I could “build” (?) something. Outside of writing and children, I’m incapable of building anything. My only reality is the temporary man with nothing to offer but dreams and fantasies, along with desire and tenderness, if he’s up to it. When I think that I started to learn Russian for a man!

At the hairdresser’s. Music. I don’t look at myself too closely, my naked face and wet hair: age. Magazines with alluring women, undressed. All this time, walking, driving, I have the sense that I’m continuing to write and live out my beautiful love story.

I should not reread this journal, it is sheer horror. The written pain, the waiting, was always hope, always life. (I am crying.) Now even that pain is no longer possible. Only emptiness awaits me. Nameless terror or emptiness, what a choice!

This morning, I regret having sent S a card.