Status Updates From The Days of Abandonment

“I, who had always set against the occasional emotional confusion the stable order of our affections, now felt so violently the bitterness of loss, an intolerable grief, the anxiety of falling out of the web of certainties and having to relearn life without the security of knowing how to do it.”

“What a mistake it had been to entrust the sense of myself to his gratifications, his enthusiasms, to the ever more productive course of his life. What a mistake, above all, it had been to believe that I couldn’t live without him, when for a long time I had not been at all certain that I was alive with him.”

“Success depends on the capacity to manipulate the obvious with calculated precision. (…), I didn’t know how to yield completely to Mario’s gaze. I had tried. Obtuse though I was, I pretended to be a right angle, and had managed to choke off even my vocation of moving from fantasy to fantasy. It hadn’t been sufficient, he had withdrawn anyway, he had gone to be joined more solidly elsewhere”

Olga is insufferable.

“In order to write well, I need to go to the heart of every question, of a smaller, safer place. Eliminate the superfluous. Narrow the field. To write truly is to speak from the depths of the maternal womb. Turn the page, Olga, begin again from the beginning.”

“At times the solidity of things is entrusted to irritating elements that appear to disrupt their cohesion.”

“He couldn’t decide to leave me and yet store in the house the perspiration from his pores, the aura of his body, so strong that it broke even the poisonous seal of Otto.”