The (In)Temporality of Summer

This year, summer begins on June 20, the day of the solstice. From that moment, the light begins to wane second by second, minute by minute.

On that day, you left for Bordeaux, to see the ocean.

It’s funny, it feels like I’m imitating Sophie Calle as I write this. Do you know her work Exquisite Pain, currently hanging on the fourth floor of the Centre Pompidou? It opens with the following sentence: “Five days ago the man I love left me.” It’s crazy how we all go through the same cycles… Even though, of course, every story remains unique. By the way, are we really unique in what we feel?

So, before me stretch three months of waiting. Three months face to face with my inner abyss. Three months to seal up all the cracks that pierce me.

What should I do with all this time? You know, the question of time holds a central place in my writing. I’ve been trying to grasp its essence since my very first literary essays. It was in the attempt to reconstruct time that I composed my first erotic short story, after sleeping with a guy who looked just like you. That was about ten years ago, our encounter. Incidentally, it was in the 18th arrondissement in Paris. That’s also where you and I made love for the last time. What a strange coincidence.

In this time without you, all I can do is write. It allows me to slow down, to catch my breath, to reconnect with myself… Writing puts my life on hold. I can’t be constantly in action like you. I need to pause to breathe, to reflect on the many questions that haunt me: Who are we? Where are we going? What are the rules of the game?

Walking helps me structure my thoughts. And so, I leave my apartment. “13” and “15” — two house number plaques, stuck right next to each other — catch my eye. I wonder who came up with the idea of putting even and odd numbers on opposite sides of the street? It’s so simple and ingenious! It sets a rhythm to the movement of the street, adds a little breathing space between the stone buildings… How about we play a little game: I’ll take the left side of the street, and you the right one, and then we’ll meet at the very end?

***

We are on June 30, the day of the first round of the legislative elections. I still feel a painful emptiness in my chest, on the left side, as if I had been shot in the heart in a previous life. You once told me that the left side of my body hurt because I voted to the right. Well, that’s over. I don’t vote anymore. I’m no longer interested in that ephemeral political spectacle. On this sunny Sunday, I’d rather do a session of Kundalini Yoga. You know, to balance my body, awaken the energy of the “coiled serpent,” open my chakras… If all my chakras were to open, would that somehow make you come back faster?

A week later, after a bit of stress, the Popular Front won. All my Instagram friends could finally breathe again. France remains France: a multicultural country that embraces itself. At last, we can move on. The election topic will soon sink away. I was right to say it was ephemeral, wasn’t I?

So what is eternal, then? You and me, the two of us, our game of hide-and-seek?

***

It’s already mid-July. Time really does fly… Now it’s my turn to leave. I’m heading to the Alpes-Maritimes department (“zero six”, as locals say) to see my old house. Besides that, I plan to stay out of the way of the second big event of this summer: the Olympic Games, taking place in Paris and Marseille.

“Once in a hundred years in your country! Once in a lifetime!” a friend tells me. “How come you don’t care?”

Well. First of all, it’s not true that it only happens once every hundred years. Let’s not forget the 1968 Winter Olympics in Grenoble. And what about the 2030 Olympics, which will also take place in France, in the Alps? Okay, I’ll stop being a pain. I know you’re also looking forward to attending the events… but my point is that all this excitement around ‘Paris 2024’ is just the result of successful marketing. By the way, it’s the same story with ‘Grey Goose,’ the “100% French vodka.”

“To be honest, it’s not the best vodka,” says a friend who knows her stuff, “It’s certainly no better than any Russian vodka. But it’s French, and so it’s expensive.”

“The French are great at commercial communication; they know how to sell themselves.”

“Exactly! That’s all you need to know about the difference between the French and the Russians.”

Yes, the French know how to sell themselves and how to make others dream. That’s why everyone wants to “see Paris and die.” But where the French are less skilled is in making that dream a reality. For instance, we can all agree that no one will ever swim in the Seine, right? There’s even “the Paris syndrome,” a syndrome of disillusionment, especially felt by poor Japanese tourists visiting the French capital teeming with rats and bedbugs.

Anyway, I’ve wandered too far into my reflections… You’re also great at commercial communication. You speak with confidence, a calm clear voice, an incredibly rich vocabulary. One can be easily persuaded by everything you say. And yet, of course, it’s obvious: business negotiations, that’s your job. As for me, my job is to turn time into words.

Wait. What is time?

For Bergson, French philosopher, the true reality of time is its duration. For Roupnel, another French philosopher, time is the instant. Which of the two is right? It’s funny: when one reaches 200 km/h on a motorcycle on the A50 highway, it usually lasts only a few seconds. But afterwards, one remembers that divine moment in all its duration. Similarly, I remember every moment spent in your presence in its full continuity. I remember every word you said, every movement of your body.

How may I traverse this time without you?

This time of summer, this time of silence.

Joseph Brodsky says, “Silence: the future fate of all our loving.”

It’s what I tell myself every day, to keep the faith.

To be honest, sometimes I love the silence between us.

I love looking straight into your eyes, saying nothing, and hearing the sound of the waves of the night sea there. Oh, la la… “The sea in your eyes.” That metaphor is overused. It’s almost sickly now, don’t you think? It reminds me of the guy who told me he had “seen a country in my eyes” and would “do everything to get a visa to enter it.” The next day, he changed his mind, admitting he was “disappointed” and “regretted spending money to invite me to dinner.” That dinner was absurd… You know, that time I was on a diet and barely touched the plate of cheese he had ordered. By sheer coincidence, some time later, we went to the same rooftop together, you and me. I was so absorbed by your gaze that I couldn’t even finish my glass of Perrier. My glass was half full when we left to make love in the Calanques.

***

“It’s too hot, isn’t it?” you asked me the other day.

It’s early August, I’m back in Marseille, and the heatwave is at its peak. My body sweats, swells, becomes sticky and malleable like modeling clay — waiting to be sculpted. My limbs tremble like the wings of a dragonfly hovering motionless in the air. Am I already weightless, outside of time? Have I already become a work of art? Am I part of Claude Garache’s clear-water bodies exhibited at the Cantini Museum?

I feel blurred, tender, fragmented, like all those salmon-colored nudes, smeared across the canvas. And I desperately want to make love to you… Much too desperately for it to happen right away. Psychologists say that this feeling of “desperate importance” keeps us apart from what we desire. I should face the reality: we are still far from each other.

And yet, no… I don’t feel that you are really so far away. Last night I felt your massive Zeus-like body pressed against mine. Then, in the morning, at the terrace of my favorite café, I passed a guy who exuded your scent… Later, another guy stopped on his scooter just behind me as I was walking up the hill toward la Bonne Mère, Marseille’s principal basilica. He found me beautiful and wanted to get acquainted with me. His name was the same as yours. That made me laugh so hard.

Can you hear this laughter through all the messages I send you?

It’s the laughter that guides us to the place where Cartesian logic no longer works.

“What did you do yesterday?” you asked.

“Yesterday, I went for a midnight swim with a friend. We swam among the glowing plankton. It was magical, as if we were bathing in the starry firmament… This ‘mirror effect’ erased any distinction between ‘up’ and ‘down.’ I finally felt free from the duality of the world, sensing space in its entirety, at least for a few moments…”

“Were you naked?”

“No.”

“Then it wasn’t a real midnight swim.”

Of course not! Nothing is real without you.

You know, like Maggie Nelson, author of Bluets, I am no longer counting the days. I know you will come back. I feel like I can already hear the roar of your motorcycle outside my building. Maybe in September? I adorrrrree September! It’s a month with an “R,” which means we can finally eat oysters again after four months of abstinence. Do you remember the last time we had oysters? Apparently, it was at “the best seafood restaurant in Montmartre,” as my friend, A., a foodie and oyster expert, who has the same name as me, says. That night, I wore a blue dress, like Tyltyl’s turtledove in Maeterlinck’s famous play The Blue Bird.

It’s funny to see you again at the Kennedy fish market on the Corniche… Last year I was there with A. We were ordering a seafood platter when I received your very first message.

The loop seems closed… Does time go in circles?

“I have no sense of time,” you say, before diving back into silence.

Finally, I understand everything. You were never gone.

You are always here, watching over me.