“Same player plays again”, here she is again bent at a right angle above her boxes with her mouth open, she already ghostly, ready to disappear, they ready to swallow once again a barely regurgitated life, a ball of hair appearing in the form simple of a few clothes, several pairs of shoes, a so-called banker’s lamp, notebooks.
A multitude of soft notebooks of all colors that she carries everywhere, from one life to another, and which she fills with her anorexic and unstable writing every morning at dawn, barely awake, for years, three pages a day without lifting the pen, the brain in the closet, the necessary purging, flushing the mental toilet to be able to get through the day.
Because, again, it’s over. Him and her. Another him, and she, always the same. After moving in, she moves out. After a year and a half of relationship – still a year and a half, she may soon celebrate her 66th birthday, the choreography has been the same since adolescence, she doesn’t know how to do otherwise: the encounter that strikes you, a stranger who becomes family in just a few days, the transplant who takes lightning speed, she who moves in with the other without questions, whether in Belgrade, Montpellier or Saint-Julien-Chapteuil, the first months atom in fusion, then, of sideways glances straddling good conduct, none of that at home, in muddy and irremediable silences, the wall that goes up, and the skin and the smile of the other become holograms, the break is necessary.
Affective mathematics
Her emotional mathematics with the reliability of a bailiff almost makes her smile on this familiar day when, returning from yet another night at the hotel, after a tiring argument, she packs her boxes, under the heavy eye of the one who will become, depending on the moods of the following days, depending on the narrative needs of his interlocutors and his Google searches, either a manipulative narcissist or a borderline personality.
But in the confusion specific to this type of climate, the turbulent bodies trying to escape and touch each other a little longer, everything is jostled. And, in the storm, her lamp, brass base and green cap, the only object of her own, capsizes from its shelf to shatter on the sand-colored parquet floor of her future ex-bedroom. Two somersaults in slow motion and the ancient glass of the lampshade shatters into a thousand emerald fragments.
His mood immediately takes a turn for the worse. She, who thought she was no longer capable of crying, felt big tears rolling down her cheeks. But she does not mourn the loss of the other, the satisfied shadow of the spectacle behind her, but of course this thing offered by her father when she moved into her first apartment, in the 1980s, with a blond or a brown, whatever.
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