“Bien sûr, nous eûmes des orages, vingt ans d’amour, c’est l’amour fol”
Of course, there were storms. Twenty years of love — that’s madness.
I feel that line in my bones. Twenty years… it’s as if it was written for me. Because it was madness. Not every day, not constantly. But there was never real peace. Always something beneath the surface. Always something ready to explode. And I stayed. Because I thought that’s what love asked of me: to stay, endure, carry. But I lost myself in the process.
“Mille fois tu pris ton bagage, mille fois je pris mon envol”
A thousand times you packed your bags, a thousand times I followed you.
That’s no exaggeration. She left. Or threatened to. And I ran after her. Every single time. I thought I had to save her. If I gave enough, stayed long enough, held on hard enough — she would stay. But it wasn’t love anymore. It was fear. And I was stuck.
“Et chaque meuble se souvient, dans cette chambre sans berceau, des éclats des vieilles tempêtes”
Every piece of furniture remembers, in this room without a cradle, the echoes of old tempests.
Even the pool house. I built it when I was mentally crashing. A place to escape to. The bathroom — built while my mother was dying. I kept working, just kept going. The kitchen — rebuilt with Joshua and Carolien, like maybe I could rebuild something of myself too.
And upstairs… there’s still a hole in the closet wall. I punched it in when I couldn’t take it anymore. When I didn’t know what else to do with the rage. And it’s still there. It doesn’t have to be fixed. Because every piece in that house carries something. Not just what was said — but everything we couldn’t say.
“Plus rien ne ressemblait à rien, tu avais perdu le goût de l’eau, et moi celui de la conquête”
Nothing resembled anything anymore. You had lost the taste for water, and I, the will to conquer.
There was nothing left. No joy in the small things. No thirst for life. And me — always the one trying to fight, to build, to repair — I couldn’t anymore. Everything in me was tired. The will to stay became heavy. And hollow.
“Mais mon amour, mon doux, mon tendre, mon merveilleux amour, de l’aube claire jusqu’à la fin du jour, je t’aime encore, tu sais, je t’aime”
But my love, my gentle, my tender, my wonderful love, from clear dawn to the end of the day, I still love you, you know, I love you.
And I sing it. Not as a promise. But as a memory. Because I did love her. Because I tried. Because it was love, however distorted. Not the kind of love that carries a future. But the kind that lingers in the body. In the memory.
“Et plus le temps nous fait cortège, et plus le temps nous fait tourment”
And the longer time walks beside us, the more it torments us.
The years didn’t soften it. No healing. Just erosion. Every attempt got harder. Every conversation heavier. And yet we kept going. On autopilot. Slowly giving up without saying it.
“Mais n’est-ce pas le pire piège que vivre en paix pour des amants ?”
But isn’t it the cruelest trap that lovers should live in peace?
We couldn’t rest together. There was always tension. Unspoken expectations. Peace felt like emptiness. And emptiness like blame. Maybe peace between us was simply never possible.
“Bien sûr, tu pleuras un peu moins tôt, je me déchirais un peu plus tard, nous nous méfiions au hasard des trahisons de nos silences”
Of course, you cried a little later, I fell apart a little later. We randomly feared the betrayals of our silences.
It was the silences that said everything. Not the words. Not the fights. But the absence. The hollow space where connection should have been. We were there, together, yet apart. And I felt the breaking. In me. In her. In everything that once held us together.
“Mais mon amour, mon doux, mon tendre, mon merveilleux amour, je t’aime encore, tu sais, je t’aime”
But my love, my gentle, my tender, my wonderful love, I still love you, you know, I love you.
And I sing it. Because it’s true. Not as a longing for return. But as a recognition. I loved her. And somewhere in me, that still echoes. Not because it was good. But because it was real.
Reflection
Sometimes you look back on twenty years of sharing a life
and realize that love was not the problem.
Not the lack of it, not the absence of effort or loyalty.
But the pain that stayed buried underneath.
I held on. I repaired. I rebuilt.
I kept quiet when I should have spoken,
and raised my voice when I longed to be soft.
And she…
she kept her silence. She left. She searched.
We were together — but never quite at the same time.
And still I sing this song.
Not out of regret, but out of recognition.
Because it’s true.
And because it outlived us.
Psychological framing
What happened between us
is something family therapists call an attachment cycle.
She pulled away, I reached out.
She left, I mended.
It repeated itself, going deeper every time.
Those cycles are often driven by old wounds:
the fear of abandonment,
or the fear of being swallowed whole.
In our case, those fears mirrored each other.
And as long as we couldn’t speak from that depth,
we triggered one another — again and again.
Love was there.
But it drowned in what remained unspoken.
Spiritual view
I don’t believe in coincidence.
And I don’t believe in failure anymore either.
What happened between us
may not have been a mistake,
but a lesson.
A lesson in boundaries.
In loyalty to myself.
In the courage to release what once felt sacred.
Maybe she was my mirror —
not to hold on to,
but to finally see myself through.
Maybe this wasn’t the end.
Just a passage.
A quiet farewell to a life I no longer needed to carry.
Final line
Sometimes you sing a song
and only by the last line
do you realize you’ve begun to let go.