IT WAS AS THOUGH I HAD LIVED SO MANY DIFFERENT, fragmented lives that I could barely find the slightest link between them. My former life was infinitely far away. A vague recollection from that time occasionally surfaced, then vanished almost immediately. I was endlessly trying to piece myself together again. But apparently I was not going about it the right way. The cracks were still gaping.

I treated myself as best I could. Years of the talking cure. First with a psychoanalyst who saved my life. Who saw no problem with me refusing the drugs I was prescribed at the hospital. Who helped me when I decided to go to university, even with the wasted year after I passed my baccalaureate.

A miracle: thanks to a friend’s intervention, who pleaded my cause with the head of my former school, I was accepted into the school’s classe préparatoire, an intensive post-baccalaureate course of study for entry into the elite French universities. I can never thank both of them enough. I was back on my feet, though I felt like a blank page. Empty. No depth. I had a reputation. In order to fit in, to live a normal life, I put on a mask, concealed who I was, went to ground.

Two or three lives later, the same first name, last name, face, of course, but none of it mattered. Every two or three years I’d change my life completely. I’d find a new lover, new friends, a new job, a new way of dressing, a new hair color, a new way of speaking. I even changed countries.

Whenever anyone sounded me out about my past, a few flickering images would emerge from a thick fog, without ever consolidating. I wanted to leave no trace or impression. I had no nostalgia at all for my childhood or adolescence. I was floating above my own self, never where I should be. I didn’t know who I was, or what I wanted. I let myself drift. I felt like I’d been alive for a thousand years.

I never spoke about my “first time.”

“How old were you, who was it with?”

Ah, if only you knew.

I had a few close friends who’d been witness to that time of my life, but they rarely brought it up. The past was the past. We all have a history to overcome. Theirs had not always been straightforward either.

Since then, I have been with many men. Loving them wasn’t hard. Trusting them was another story. Always on the defensive, I would ascribe intentions to them that they didn’t necessarily have: that they wanted to use me, manipulate me, deceive me, that they cared only about themselves.

Whenever a man tried to give me pleasure, or worse still, tried to take his pleasure through me, I had to fight against a kind of disgust crouching in the shadows, about to swoop down on me, against a symbolic violence, which wasn’t really there, that I imputed to every gesture.

It took me a long time to be able to sleep with a man without the aid of alcohol or psychotropic drugs. To be able, without any hidden agenda, to surrender myself, with my eyes closed, to another body. To find the path to my own desire.

It took me a long time, many years, to finally meet a man with whom I felt completely secure.