Trafika Europe 12 - French Bon-Bons

Not One Day

happens to tell you things that are curiously intimate. And you don’t know how to interpret these moments or these confidences. You feel (or do you imagine?) something else, perhaps something real (what an absurd hypothesis… ). Are these the moments when her guard is down, the moments when the former persona of Y* surges from under the hard armor of frivolities, strategies, and courtship rituals? Or else are they also inauthentic, another ruse or habit, a ritual behavior, a tactic of these milieus: the affectation of profundity, the exhibition of a sincerity destined to reassure us, all of us, that we are still very human and not the grotesque automata of a stock plot? Is it simply that the private, the intimate, the things felt are only extra ammunition for a war game of frivolity? And how should you respond, to what should you address yourself: to the ostensible appearance, or to the furtively discovered depth? Must you show that you glimpse something that troubles you, show that you recognize something perceptible, that you’re ready to understand it and protect it like a secret? Or must you, just like her, repudiate it, enjoy it, not insist, and remain in the realm of social levity? Is it out of prudishness that she acts thus? For to insist would perhaps reveal or expose some vulnerability… But we have learned that this world is traitorous and that the surest way to preserve what we cherish is to devalue it overtly so that no one would think to take it, to flaunt it so that no one can expose it for what it is or steal it.

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