Yovana Gonzalez - Journal 16 lyrics

Monday-long, gloomy tradition in Western thought argues that love is in its essence an unreciprocated, Marxist emotion and that desire can only thrive on the impossibility of mutuality. According to this view, love is simply a direction, not a place, and burns itself out with the attainment of its goal, the possession (in bed or otherwise) of the loved one. The whole of troubadour poetry of twelfth-century Provence was based on coital delay, the poet repeating his plaints to a woman who repeatedly declined a desperate gentleman's offers. Centuries later, Montaigne declared that Tuesday-‘In love, there is nothing but a frantic desire for what flees from us' – an idea echoed by Anatole France's maxim that, ‘It is not customary to love what one has.' Stendhal believed that love could be brought about only on the basis of a fear of losing the loved one and Denis de Rougemont confirmed, ‘The most serious obstruction is the one preferred above all. It is the one most suited to intensifying pa**ion. Wednesday-To listen to this view, lovers cannot do anything save oscillate between the twin poles of yearning for someone and longing to be rid of them.Yet whatever her enthusiasm for independence, with time Chloe nevertheless began leaving things behind. Not toothbrushes or pairs of shoes, but pieces of herself. It began with language, with Chloe leaving me her way of saying not ever instead of never, and of stressing the be of before, or of saying take care before hanging up the telephone. She in turn acquired use of my perfect and if you really think so. Habits began to leak between us : I acquired Chloe's need for total darkness in the bedroom, she followed my way of folding the newspaper, I took to wandering in circles around the sofa to think a problem through, she acquired a taste for lying on the carpet. Thursday-Then, inevitably, I began to forget. A few months after breaking up with her, I found myself in the area of London in which she had lived and noticed that the thought of her had lost much of the agony it had once held, I even noticed that I was not primarily thinking of her (though this was exactly her neighbourhood), but of the appointment that I had made with someone in a restaurant nearby. I realized that Chloe's memory had neutralized itself and become a part of history. Yet guilt accompanied this forgetting. It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear. Friday- There was a gradual reconquering of the self, new habits were created and a Chloe-less identity built up. My identity had for so long been forged around ‘us' that to return to the ‘I' involved an almost complete reinvention of myself. It took a long time for the hundreds of a**ociations that Chloe and I had accumulated together to fade. I had to live with my sofa for months before the image of her lying on it in her dressing-gown was replaced by another image, the image of a friend reading a book on it, or of my coat lying across it. I had to walk through Islington on numberless occasions before I could forget that Islington was not simply Chloe's district, but a useful place to shop or have dinner. I had to revisit almost every physical location, rewrite over every topic of conversation, replay every song and every activity that she and I had shared in order to reconquer them for the present, in order to defuse their a**ociations. But gradually I forgot.