In this blue notebook I’ve invented a narrator, male or female, it doesn’t matter, who watched me write, a second writer, the real one, who guided my hand when I ran out of courage, and put some order into my ideas when my uncertainties became too significant. I sensed him, let’s say him for simplicity’s sake, leaning over my shoulder, following my writing, guiding it, lavishing advice when it was going badly or compliments if I was able to express properly the essence of my thoughts. And allowing himself now and then to make comments. I wasn’t writing, he was, even if it was written in the first person. And by me.

I hoped that imagining this notebook being composed by someone else who was dictating it to me would give me a certain distance, provide me with me an objectivity I couldn’t achieve otherwise. I treated myself like a character in a novel who is writing what someone else is dictating, and now that my blue notebook is finished, I would like the other person, the true author of the novel – because then it would be a novel – to take my destiny in hand, replace me definitively and suggest or, rather, predict for me how all of it – my existence, its meaning if it has one – will end. What will become of Gilbert and me. And whether some day I will go back to the writing that I love so much. As for me, I don’t know. Not him (or her). He could decide that it will end well, or not; suggest either a ray of hope or the bleak ending of a hardboiled novel; he could throw me – and deep down that’s what I would like! – back into Gilbert’s arms, find a cure for his circular madness, a miracle remedy, a panacea, and give me back my happiness. Give me back my happiness. It’s all I ask for.

That’s what the narrator of a novel should do, isn’t it? Find an ending. A fair one.

     I am looking for a fair ending.

Key West, 19 December 2004–4 May 2005