madeline

me: “sorry ): can’t come!! got so much to do at home”

But it was impossible for me to make the necessary effort to find myself again. No matter how many times I remembered the recent events in Les Bugues, it was another who had lived them, who had replaced me forever, waiting for tonight. And if I didn’t want to go mad, I had to find her again, she who had lived them, my sister, and embrace her. Les Bugues became distorted in spurts of successive images, cold, foreign. I didn’t recognize them anymore. I didn’t remember them anymore. I, that night, reduced to myself alone, had other memories. And yet even those, huddled in the dark, only tried to creep into my memory, to make themselves seen, to breathe for a moment. Memories from before me, from before my memories. [...] I’ve existed for twenty-five years. I was very little, then I grew and reached my size, the size I am now and that I’ll be forever. I could have died in one of the thousand ways people die, and yet I managed to cover twenty-five years of life, I am still alive, not yet dead. I breathe. From my nostrils emanates real breath, wet and warm. Without trying, I managed to die of nothing. It advances stubbornly, what seems halted, in this moment: my life. I hear the beat of my heart, and the palms of my hands feel like they belong to me: to me, to the one who endures my discovery in this moment. In this very moment as I hurtle with the armies of things—men, women, beasts, wheat, months … My life: a fruit I must have eaten some of without tasting it, without realizing it, distractedly. I am not responsible for this age or for this image. You recognize it. It must be mine. I’m all right with that. I can’t do anything differently. I am that girl, there, once and for all and forever. I started to be her twenty-five years ago. I can’t even hold myself in my arms. I am bound to this waist I cannot encircle. My mouth, and the sound of my laugh, never will I know them. Yet I wish I could embrace the girl that I am and love her. I look like other women. I’m a woman of rather ordinary appearance, I know. My age is an average age. You could say that I’m still young. My past, only others could tell me whether it’s interesting. I don’t know. It’s made up of days and things that I cannot bring myself to believe really happened to me. It’s my past, it’s my story. I can’t bring myself to be interested in it because it’s my own. It’s as though only tomorrow will really begin to include my past. Starting tomorrow night, time will count. For the moment, every past other than mine belongs to me more. Tiène’s past or Nicolas’s past, for example. It’s because no one warned me that I would live. If I had known that one day I would have a story, I would have chosen it, I would have lived with more care to make it beautiful and true so that I would like it. Now it’s too late. This story has begun, it leads me where it likes, I don’t know where and I have no say in it. Even though I try to push it away, it follows me; everything falls into place, everything decomposes in memory, and nothing new can be invented.