She Dear One Who Followed Me

Sporadically throughout the 1980s, I catalogued my existence via notebooks, cassette tapes, odd scraps of paper and so on, and recently, I decided to transform some of these rough diary entries into literary works, such as the one below, "La Tres Chere Qui M'a Suivit" ("She Dear One Who Followed Me"), which began its life as a series of scrawled notes on two or three pieces of spare paper, based on conversations I'd engaged in with a close friend some time in the early part of the decade although all the talking contained within the inverted commas emanates from my friend, not I. The first section begins with "It was she", and ends with "you could hurt me, you know", and has been composed using extracts from several separate conversations, all of which I have also edited, while the second, taken from a single edited conversation begins with "You are a Don Juan" and culminates with "there's something so...so...your look". The final section, also culled from a single conversation, has been reproduced verbatim. Certain portions of the piece have been translated from the original French, this being my friend's native tongue. As a whole, it provides something of an insight into my condition in those times, some ten years before I became a Christian.

It was she, bless her,
who followed me...
she'd been crying...
she's too good for me,
that's for sure...
"Your friends
are too good to you...
it makes me sick
to see them...
you don't really give...
you indulge in conversation,
but your mind
is always elsewhere,
ticking over.
You could hurt me,
you know...
You are a Don Juan,
so much.
Like him, you have
no desires...
I think you have
deep fears...
There's something so...so...
your look.
It's not that
you're empty...
but that there is
an omnipresent sadness
about you,
a fatality..."