Philippe Besson

For a long time, I tried to write down words about his disappearance. I found a lot. I even classified them in alphabetical order, if you want to know: “abandonment,” “absence,” “death,” “departure,” “dissolution,” “erasure,” “escape,” “extinction,” “flight,” “loss,” “retreat,” “vanishing,” “withdrawal,”—the other ones I forgot.

do you take after your mother

regardless of his pleas and ploys

I’m seventeen years old.

I don’t know then that one day I won’t be seventeen. I don’t know that youth doesn’t last, that it’s only a moment, and then it disappears and by the time you finally realize it, it’s too late. It’s finished, vanished, lost

My fingers find a constellation of moles, just as I guessed, on his back

We believe that we are protected by our youth. We are seventeen years old. You don’t die when you are seventeen years old.

In the end, love was only possible because he saw me not as who I was, but as the person I would become.

(And when you’ve been hurt once, you’re afraid to try again later, in dread of enduring the same pain. You avoid getting hurt in an attempt to avoid suffering: for years, this principle will serve as my holy sacrament.

I wrote the word: love. I did consider using another one. It’s a curious notion, love; difficult to identify and define. There are so many degrees and variations

I concluded with an aching finality that the could-happen possibilities were gone, and that doing whatever you wanted was over. The future didn’t exist anymore. Everything was in the past and would stay there.
—Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park