Socrates's daimon (the one who spoke first within him ) whispered to him: no. My daimon, on the contrary, is my stupidity: like the Nietzschean ass, I say yes to everything, in the field of my love.

And, long after the amorous relation is allayed, I keep the habit of hallucinating the being I have loved: sometimes I am still in anxiety over a telephone call that is late, and no matter who is on the line, I imagine I recognize the voice I once loved: I am an amputee who still feels pain in his missing leg.

Horrible figure of mourning: acedia, hard-heartedness: irritability, impotence to love. Anguished because I don't know how to restore generosity to my life--or love. How to love?

I am waiting for an arrival, a return, a promised sign... Everything is solemn: I have no sense of proportions.

The true act of mourning is not to suffer from the loss of the loved object; it is to discern one day, on the skin of the relationship, a certain tiny stain, appearing there as the symptom of a certain death : for the first time I am doing harm to the one I love, involuntarily, of course, but without panic.

To whom can I put this question (with any hope of an answer)? Does being able to live without someone you loved mean you loved her less than you thought... ?

(A squeeze of the hand—enormous documentation—a tiny gesture within the palm, a knee which doesn't move away, an arm extended, as if quite naturally, along the back of a sofa and against which the other's head gradually comes to rest—this is the paradisiac realm of subtle and clandestine signs: a kind of festival not of the senses but of meaning.)

Am I in love? - Yes, since I'm waiting." The other never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn't wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game: whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover's fatal identity is precisely: I am the one who waits.