TE16 Turkish Delight

Our Best Love Story appealing to a passion by engendering it in the imagination. I once more thought of many questions and solitudes wavering around this bizarre phrase, always being reminded of old loves, dispassion, abandonments, undesired separations, and the smell of whorehouses, and I thought, what affair, what lover, what tiny joy is there that isn’t born in one imagination and spent in another? Then I felt slightly ashamed of myself, not to mention exasperated, recalling the enormous quantities of time I wasted on nuance and these useless, impractical words. There were times such as these when I go silent, without mentioning anything to anyone, and try to hide between a pair of parentheses or between lines. My occasional surfacing to look for you in these journeys between texts could only be explained by my reluctance to abandon this particular story. And that’s partly the reason that we’re here among these prolonged phrases this evening. On two very disparate sides of the mirror, we search once more for a theme I expect never to be able to exhaust. And I can’t say why, but once again I’d like to bring to this text all the candlelights of my past, all its incense, cheese, and soup aromas, a walk on a rainy Sunday, frost-covered benches and piping hot coffee on a nighttime beach. The infamous mirror reappears, however, and I must assume my real role in the play once again. You apply some lipstick to your lips, as well as some joy and a bit of jadedness. Whether I’d like to or not, I can hear knocking on the door. I assume my role in the play, indeed, and assume that I can set out on the search for a completely different text with a brand-new sentence.

45