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Translated automatically from French. Read the original.
I grind my teeth and it hurts in the muscle that holds up my neck on the right. I know absolutely nothing about the names of flowers or of muscles. I don’t know many of the people who walked past me this morning, nor the two workers who nearly made a few hundred kilos of compact matter, cube-shaped and remarkable for its weight, land on my heavy head. I dodged it without even realising, just like that, by sheer force of circumstance. One of them let out a furious cry, the other tutted in my direction. He was standing on the truck, a crane at the front, carrying out and supervising at once the transfer of the load to its place, in the middle of the pavement reserved for passers-by. My eyes, glued to my phone, sided with his tutting.
I quickened my pace, steering light shoes charged with moving a rusty back. I got to the café and I’m still grinding, all the grief gathered into one Ritalin tablet that dances on my keyboard to the rhythm of my strokes on those little keys where the letters I type were never engraved. Their absence blurs my identity. I once said that what would leave an eternal red mark on a country’s white flag would be an accent; today, people tut at a foreign pronunciation. I am ashamed, of him, of them and of myself. The confusion begins when the attention paid to this shame becomes a daily anxiety.
I take Ritalin only in times of crisis (sometimes what sounds like an easy excuse is simply true, which is exactly why it has been crowned the easy excuse). It glitters there, the tablet, above the F4 key – which also darkens the screen when you press it together with Shift – for an hour and twenty-two minutes now. Its expiry date passed not long ago. I asked, I was told it was fine.
My apartment too, twenty-two square metres. The bandwidth does stretch its dimensions, but not those of the purple desk, perpetually dirty, that Ron found in the street last year. The virginal charm of this apartment has dissipated before my eyes and left me a cylindrical white plastic box, almost empty.
Ron’s father died this morning. He is three thousand kilometres from me and the bandwidth isn’t wide enough to reach out a steady hand (that no longer bites its nails) into his thick, shaved hair. The funeral is happening right now, familiar souls who mean closeness sobbing in a cemetery next to the military cemetery. The procession holds the weapon of the apocalypse. The sun beats down. My backside dozes in a consoling sofa, power sockets hidden behind thick burgundy cushions.
My weapon of the apocalypse, like a baby, like an animal covered in fur, winks at me from its temporary spot, now between F5 and F6. I remember that someone once said on TV that “everyone who lives here is entitled to their own State, plus an F16 courtesy of the manufacturer”.
Ron’s father made toys, and look, I have just spoken of him in the past tense. I am suddenly nostalgic for something that, only a few hours ago, was gaunt and unhappy but solid and existing. He made toys, took part in love affairs, ran a company and family cells, talked and walked and drove; thanks to the discs in his car with its so particular smell, the soundtrack of my adolescence took shape.
Familiar souls loved him. When the nurse asked everyone to leave his room for a few minutes, because a man needs calm to die, he breathed his last. “As usual,” Ron tells me over the phone while queuing to buy a grave.
And I am far away and my bones bury themselves in this sofa, the same colour as my sweater, easing the dissolution of my organs into a grief without duration, without a time axis, that slips in like a death, hard and rough like hair gel.
Someone else is lying in a bed thinking about my life. I know because I do the same with other people’s lives. I also know there are no simple solutions and maybe, sometimes, the solution is knowing that someone else is going to the trouble of thinking about what occupies me, at least as heavy as the load that threatened to crush my head this morning, at least as ridiculous as me, head bent over a phone, slipping away from view, refusing to apologise. Today, again, I won’t take Ritalin.