Trafika Europe 12 - French Bon-Bons

Not One Day

Eros, its inestimable poverty offered as a sacrifice to the ostentatious abundance of our consumer mores. Ultimately, you act as if the thing were real and felt, and as if you were still speaking with the woman you believed you knew. You realize, after the fact, the absurdity of your conduct and sometimes fear that she will interpret your response as a sort of affected sentimentality, the marks of affection as weakness or calculation. And at the end of it all, you are still surprised by the distant marks of her benevolence toward you, and ask yourself if it’s the ancient bond that perhaps never was, or was only fleetingly, that faithfully dictates them, or else something else (but what? You are tired of rereading Balzac, Gracian, Acceto, La Rochefoucauld… ). And still, you ask yourself now and then why you see her so seldomly. Is it because she finds you so remote, your interests perhaps too distant from the world that haunts her, this world that absorbs her, it seems, entirely (this world where she absorbs herself entirely? to flee? to surrender herself? or else because there is no other… ), or if it’s because she feels as awkward with you as you have felt for a long time with her, uncertain as you both are of the plane on which you might meet, the virtual or the artificial, and afraid to choose one or the other. And above all, does this all take place only in your head, where not even the phantom limbs of a brief dead past reside, only the pure hallucinations of meaning, the psychological moiré effect without a shred of substance, the shadows without bodies to carry them, nothing but

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