Us (Fragment 1)

“I’m stealing all your pillows while you’re sleeping, you’ll see. Now that you’ve got me, you don’t need them anymore anyway.”

In fact, I needed a lot more than a pillow between the two of us. He managed to get so much closer than I would have wished…

I knew, however, that he was leaving in a week and then I could return to my pillow, harbouring no regrets. I will have had a one week adventure, during which I will have allowed him to hold my hand while walking together. We would share pancakes in a small bistro and I’d let him kiss me, just like a lovesick adolescent. I would even let him fall asleep in my bed, holding me in his arms instead of a pillow. We would have the illusion of a kind of communion and communication, of which neither one of us was truly capable. We would feign mutual empathy and understanding, we would finish each other’s sentences and we would pretend we could be different people, that we could be more than individual islands. Only one day after having met each other, his vacation with me brought about the unexpected luxury of imagining a selfless selfishness, of glimpsing at a possibility of transcending individual limits while gaining access to that fatidic plain of togetherness. I was denying it, he was dreaming of it.

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