Suicide

You used to drift through a visual form of communism, according to which things belonged to those who looked at them

You wondered how, being so different, they could have formed a union; but you noted that in you there was a mixture of the violence of the one and the gentleness of the other. Your father exerted his violence on others. Your mother was sympathetic to the suffering of others. One day you directed the violence you had inherited toward yourself. You dished it out like your father and you took it like your mother.

But you were on occasion drawn to speak of God, in the sense of an abstract entity, a conversational topic, a curiosity reserved for others

You used to jot down in a notebook the things you would have been able to do by following contemporary tourist trends: Watch people at prayer in an Indian temple. Dive in Bali. Ski in Val-d’Isère. Visit an exhibition in Helsinki. Swim in Porto-Vecchio. When you were sick of your bedroom, you consoled yourself by rereading your notes on these imaginary holidays, and you closed your eyes to visualize them.

When I hear of a suicide, I think of you again. Yet, when I hear that someone died of cancer, I don’t think of my grandfather and grandmother, who also died of it. They share cancer with millions of others. You, however, own suicide.
A ruin is an accidental aesthetic

ruin is an accidental aesthetic object. If it becomes beautiful, this was certainly not the intention. A ruin is not constructed or maintained. The tendency of a ruin is to crumble down into a heap. The most beautiful parts remain standing despite their wear and tear. The memory of you is what stays up, your body what subsides. Your ghost remains upright in my memory, while your skeleton is decomposing in the earth.

You don’t make me sad, but solemn. You impair my incurable frivolity. Whenever I am too spontaneous and self-centered, and, for some reason or other, your face appears to me, I realize again the importance of the people around me. I see things from a perspective I’m rarely able to achieve. I take advantage on your behalf of things you can no longer experience. Dead, you make me more alive.

Your life was a hypothesis. Those who die old are made of the past. Thinking of them, one thinks of what they have done. Thinking of you, one thinks of what you could have become. You were, and you will remain, made up of possibilities.

Often all it took was for someone else to speak your own words back to you for you to like them.