It was while in the depths of this literary despair, sitting on the cold tiled floor of the bathroom, that I picked up my phone and sent a message to Marie. It was almost 2 a.m., and I knew the impression my message would give: in the world of love, anything sent after midnight was almost certainly written in the grip of depression. It would be much better to wait until tomorrow afternoon and send her an inoffensive, falsely reassuring little text. At two in the morning, she was bound to think I was cracking up, that I was dying without her, and let’s be honest: she wouldn’t be completely wrong. But the conversation with Valérie had left me with an urge to find out how she was. Plus there was the context, of course: a highly eventful evening. When you feel fragile, you are bound to miss the person with whom you used to share everything. A problem shared is a problem halved, as they say.

And what was wrong with telling someone you missed them? Yes, that was all I had to say. Then maybe add: Thinking of you. Yes, Thinking of you. That’s not too much. In fact, you could almost describe it as friendly.¹⁶ I hoped she wouldn’t think it was too pushy or pathetic. If she felt like that, I would rather she didn’t reply. A simple, cold, distant ‘thank you’ would have been unbearable. Or worse, ‘thank you very much’, which would plunge us irreversibly into the world of bloodless politeness. Yes, it would be better not to get any reply at all. I sent that message the way earthlings emit signals into outer space, to check for extraterrestrial life. Yes, that’s all my message was: a simple method of declaring that I was still alive.

Then something kind of crazy happened: she replied almost instantaneously. I checked several times that it was really her and not some sort of hallucination. I read the name slowly: M-A-R-I-E. She said it was so good to hear from me. For just a second, I wondered why she wasn’t asleep at that time of night. Usually, she loved going to bed before midnight. Perhaps she wasn’t alone? What an idiot I was, ruining a wonderful moment with such pointless thoughts. I needed to focus on the essential fact: she had replied to me immediately. She hadn’t pretended. She hadn’t done what most people do, waiting a while before replying to show that they are not desperate for human connection. Nothing is more beautiful than offering yourself to someone else straightforwardly with an immediate response.

And her response was divinely simple too. She just wrote that she was happy to hear from me. And that she hoped I was well. We exchanged a few nice messages, concluding with our mutual desire to meet up again soon. And this wasn’t a novel, it was reality: we had made plans to see each other. I couldn’t get over the strange turn this evening had taken: from a painful confession to shared laughter; from a relationship that was dying to one being reborn.