Exposing fragility.

Bientôt l’été is an intensely personal piece. Not so much because it talks about things that I have lived through, but because it exposes things that I hold dear. A certain way of looking at life. A way that reading Duras at an early age certainly helped form.

It exposes a certain pride in being fragile, and a love for things that in any other context would seem corny and trite. To be charmed by the vanity of a young woman. To allow the boorish bluntness of a man to arouse one. To find a fragile subtlety in something admitting the fondness of would mean public scorn. To proclaim out loud that love is everything. And to feel surprised by one’s ineptitude and often carelessness concerning the matter. And to realize that I still don’t know what love is, while I know that I do know. And to enjoy the contradictions. Above all, to enjoy the dizzying charm of contractions.

And yet, the complete exposure of my weak parts feels like a sort of strength to me. As if making all one’s secrets public makes one invulnerable. There is nothing anyone can ever say of me that I have not said of myself.

To have been there.

PS: To know that what one thought of as love when one was young is still the same as what one thinks of it now. Only now one can laugh about it too. While it remains the most solemnly serious thing. Possibly the only thing that retained its weight after all that time.

To love.