Osame Osayande > Recent Status Updates

I only remember my surprise that all the theories about the right to experiment and the desirability of varied experience—-theories that had seemed so entirely adequate in discussing the sexual adventures of acquaintances-were no help at all when the decision concerned Peter and me.

I know it all sounds absurd — as if I thought then the thing should be played as a farce. I did not. There was anguish and regret and bewilderment. But they have faded.

"Ex-wives ... young and handsome ex-wives like us, illustrate how this freedom for women turned out to be God's greatest gift to men."

"You're an ex-wife, Pat, because it is the most important thing to know about you ... explains everything else, that you once were married to a man who left you."

The man who returned that evening wasn't the man I was carrying inside me throughout the year when he was here, and when I was writing about him. I shall never see that man again. Yet it is that surreal, almost non-existent last visit that gives my passion its true meaning, which is precisely to be meaningless, and to have been for two years the most violent and unaccountable reality ever.

Of the living text, this book is only the remainder, a minortrace. One day it will mean nothing to me, just like its living counterpart.

Throughout this period, all my thoughts and all my actions involved the repetition of history. I wanted to turn the present back into the past, opening on to happiness.

If I went to the same place I had been to last year, when he was here, 1 would wear the same suit as before, trying to convince myself that identical circumstances produce identical effects

The fact that this meeting, understandably, never took place, succeeded only in frustrating me: I would stride down the Boulevard des Italiens, bathed in sweat, under his imaginary gaze while he was in fact somewhere else, inaccessible.

Whenever I went to Paris, I would expect to see him drive past with a woman by his side. I would walk very straight, affecting an attitude of proud indifference in anticipation of our meeting.

Sometimes I told myself that he might spend a whole day without even thinking about me. I imagined him getting up, drinking his coffee, talking, and laughing, as if I didn't exist. Compared to my own obsession, such indifference filled me with wonder.

I do not wish to explain my passion that would imply that it was a mistake or some disorder I need to justify-just want to describe it

I was unaffected by the inconveniences of daily life. I didn't worry about a two-month postal strike since A never wrote to me (no doubt the cautious attitude of a married man). I would sit calmly through traffic jams and queue patiently at the bank, and was not annoyed by the surly attitude of the clerk. Nothing could make me lose my temper.

In the same way, when I was reading, the sentences that made me pause were those concerning a relationship between a man and a woman. I felt that they could teach me something about A and that they lent credibility to the things I wished to believe.

Centuries and centuries, hundreds of generations have gone by, and it is only now that one can see this—a man's penis and a woman's vagina coming together, the sperm-something one could barely take in without dying has become as easy to watch as a handshake.

How hard it is to kill hope! Time after time, one thinks one has trodden it down, stamped it to death. Time after time, like a noxious insect, it begins to stir again, it shivers back again into a faint tremulous life. Once more it worms its way into one's heart, to instil its poison, to gnaw away the solid hard foundations of life and leave in their place the hollow phantom of illusion.

My indefinite desire was like some pervading, unlocalized ache of my whole being. If I could only know, thought I, where it lies, what it is. In my heart? In my brain? In my body? But no, all I felt was that I desired something.

At other times, it was the power of expression that seemed maddeningly denied me. If only I could express myself-in words, in music, anyhow. I imagined myself a prima donna or a great actress. Oh, heavenly relief! Oh, an outlet for all this ferment which was boiling within me! Perilous stuff! If I could only get rid of it— shout it to the world-declaim it away!

something is bothering me. i can’t think!

I was without consciousness, that is to say, more utterly absorbed than was ever possible again. For after that first time there was always part of me standing aside, comparing, analysing, objecting: "Is this real? Is this sincere?" All the world of my predecessors was there before me, taking, as it were, the bread out of my mouth.