We've been seeing each other for about three months. We're having dinner in a little courtyard, the food's awful. She wants us to have a nice time, she wants me to tell her that I love her. In between apartments, I'm crashing at her place in Marcadet. I could have gone somewhere else, maybe stayed with some friends in Oberkampf, but having me there makes her happy because she wants to make believe, because I'm not giving her the love she wants. So now she's psyched about us shacking up together, even though it's only for three days, even though I leave as soon as she wakes up and often go out for dinner in the evenings, as if me sleeping in her bed and eating her yogurts made any difference, as if it meant anything at all, the days going by. I watch her counting them, piling them up like sugar cubes without ever resetting the counter to zero when I leave her, I wonder how many days she thinks it'll take for this fling to count as true love, I wonder how many days you can spend with someone you don't give a shit about, I wonder how long it takes for the hate to rear its ugly head. She cried this afternoon, she said she doesn't really understand where we're at, she feels like she can't talk to me anymore. I hold my hand up in the air, I say, I don't love you this much, then I lower it, I say, I don't love you this much, then I put my hand midway, I love you this much, that's how it is. I wait for her to leave me. I've already done it too many times.

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