(Sartre) (The world is full without me, as in Nausea; the world plays at living behind a glass partition; the world is in an aquarium; I see everything close up and yet cut off, made of some other substance; I keep falling outside myself, without dizziness, without blue, into precision.

Am I in love? – yes, since I am waiting. The other one 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 this: I am the one who waits.

[...] I myself cannot (as an enamored subject) construct my love story to the end: I am its poet (its bard) only for the beginning; the end, like my own death, belongs to others; it is up to them to write the fiction, the external, mythic narrative.

To whom could 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...?

The world is full of indiscreet neighbors with whom I must share the other. The world is in fact just that : an obligation to share. The world ( the worldly ) is my rival. . . You belong to me as well," the world says.

But isn't desire always the same, whether the object is present or absent? Isn't the object always absent?

(I was looking at everything in the other's face, the other'sbody, coldly : lashes, toenail, thin eyebrows, thin lips, theluster of the eyes, a mole, a way of holding a cigarette; Iwas fascinated-fascination being, after all, only the extremeof detachment-by a kind of colored ceramicized,vitrified figurine in which I could read, without understandinganything about it, the cause of my desire. )

Language is a skin : I rub my language against theother. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers atthe tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

There are nightmares in which the Mother appears, her face hardened into a cold and severe expression. The fade-out of the loved object is the terrifying return of the Wicked Mother, the inexplicable retreat of love, the well-known abandonment of which the Mystics complain : God exists, the Mother is present, but they no longer love.