I always wanted to write as if I no longer existed at the moment the book was published. To write as if I were about to die – no judge. Even if it is an illusion to believe that truth only comes with death. The first movement I made upon waking was to grab his erect penis from sleep and stay like that, as if clinging to a branch. I thought, "As long as I hold it, I am not lost in the world." Today, when I reflect on the meaning of the phrase, it seems to me that I meant that this was all I longed for, nothing else: to have my hand wrapped around the penis of that particular man. Now, he is in the bed of another woman. She might be making the same move, reaching out and grabbing his penis. For months, I saw her hand and thought it was mine.
And yet, I was the one who left B. a few months ago, after a six-year relationship. Out of boredom but also inability to sacrifice my freedom – which I had regained after eighteen years of marriage – for a shared life that he had desperately wanted from the start. We continued to talk on the phone, saw each other occasionally. One night he called me, said he was leaving his studio apartment, he was going to live with a woman. From then on, there would be rules for our calls, only on mobile, for our meetings, never at night, never on weekends. In the feeling of collapse that overwhelmed me, I realized that something else was emerging. From that moment, the existence of the other woman dominated mine. All my thoughts now passed through her.