The evening after she goes, you tell the story of the affair in a bar. At first you tell it as if it were possible to do so, then you give up. Then you tell it laughingly, as if it were impossible for it to have happened or possible for you to have invented it.
The next day, suddenly, perhaps you’d notice her absence in the room. The next day, you’d perhaps feel a desire to see her there again, in the strangeness of your solitude, as a stranger herself.
Perhaps you’d look for her outside your room, on the beaches, outside cafés, in the streets. But you wouldn’t be able to find her, because in the light of day you can’t recognize anyone. You wouldn’t recognize her. All you know of her is her sleeping body beneath her shut or half-shut eyes. The penetration of one body by another – that you can’t recognize, ever. You couldn’t ever.
When you wept it was just over yourself and not because of the marvelous impossibility of reaching her through the difference that separates you.
— Duras, ‘The Malady of Death’ (trans. B. Bray)
