I was always amazed when people were kind to us. - Patrick Modiano

Like many writers before me, I believe in coincidence and, sometimes, in the novelist’s gift for clairvoyance- the word gift not being the right one, for it implies a kind of superiority. Clairvoyance is simply the part of profession: the essential leaps of imagination, the need to fix one’s mind on detail-to the point of obsession, in fact, so as not to lose the thread and to give in one’s natural laziness. All the, is tension, this cerebral exercise may well lead in the long run to “flashes of intuition concerning events past and future” , as defined by Larousse dictionary under “clairvoyance”.

Perhaps it was one of those mild, sunny winter days when you have a feeling of holiday and eternity- the illusion that passage of time is suspended, and that you need only slip through this breach to escape the trap which is closing around you.

Circumstance and settings are of no importance. One day this sense of emptiness and remorse submerges you. Then , like a tide, it ebbs and disappears. But in the end it returns in force, and she couldn’t shake it off. Nor could I?