Philippe Besson

I’m seventeen years old.

I don’t know then that one day I won’t be seventeen. I don’t know that youth doesn’t last, that it’s only a moment, and then it disappears and by the time you finally realize it, it’s too late. It’s finished, vanished, lost

My fingers find a constellation of moles, just as I guessed, on his back

We believe that we are protected by our youth. We are seventeen years old. You don’t die when you are seventeen years old.

In the end, love was only possible because he saw me not as who I was, but as the person I would become.

(And when you’ve been hurt once, you’re afraid to try again later, in dread of enduring the same pain. You avoid getting hurt in an attempt to avoid suffering: for years, this principle will serve as my holy sacrament.

I wrote the word: love. I did consider using another one. It’s a curious notion, love; difficult to identify and define. There are so many degrees and variations

I concluded with an aching finality that the could-happen possibilities were gone, and that doing whatever you wanted was over. The future didn’t exist anymore. Everything was in the past and would stay there.
—Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park

“the bac,” the French end-of-high-school exam.

To him, I’m a stranger.
I’m in this state of one-way desire.
I feel this desire swarming in my belly and running up my spine. But I have to constantly contain and compress it so that it doesn’t betray me in front of others. Because I’ve already understood that desire is visible

This feeling of love, it transports me, it makes me happy. At the same time, it consumes me and makes me miserable, the way all impossible loves are miserable.
I am acutely aware of the impossibility