Osame Osayande’s Reviews > Simple Passion > Status Update

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.

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.