I wanted to write down these two lives, these successive deaths that had annihilated my will to live, that had rendered senseless any project, any investment in a world to which I no longer had any ties.

In fact it had become impossible for me to think of anything else; I needed to devote what was left of my willpower to undertaking the story of my beloved in the form of a biography, to be tidied up later once freed from the infinite reemergence of dispersed fragments in the wandering of waking dreams. Perhaps, if I were to accomplish this task, I would be delivered from the torture inflicted on me by the endless rumination and unruly resurgences that, rather than coming together to form a continuum, only thrust to the surface fractured and atrociously mutilated limbs. I settled into a modest hotel room in Amsterdam at the border of the red-light district and imposed a sort of house arrest upon myself.

This is where for two weeks in front of a typewriter I have endlessly forced my memory to purge itself of its possessor and, with the help of notes hastily made a long time ago or jotted down during my final days in New York, to retrace and reestablish the contours of this love.