Au Revoir

Au revoir has the return built into it. Until we see each other again. It's a promise you make without noticing you've made it, and you go on making it for years — at doors, on sidewalks, into phones — until one day you make it and it isn't true, and the grammar has committed you anyway.

Goodbye is a contraction of God be with you, which nobody remembers and nobody means. What's left is the sound. Two syllables, the second one falling, and nothing after it.

I learned the difference on Rue Drolet, standing in the hall after the door had shut, working out which of the two had just happened to me.

We built the thing in one language and took it apart in the other, and the tools didn't fit. Tu es l'erreur que je continue de répéter is a good sentence — it has a spine, and it lands on répéter, on the repetition itself, which is the accusation. You are the mistake I keep making is a bad one. It goes soft in the middle and comes to rest on making, which is nothing, which is a word you could use about a sandwich.

Gainsbourg: je t'aime, moi non plus. In English, I love you, me neither. It isn't even wrong. It's just stupid.

You're quieter in English, she said.

You're crueller in French, I said.

Both true. One language for the store and one for the other thing, and no way to get a sentence intact from one to the other.

She's still in the neighbourhood. We use the same dep. I go at eleven now, which is later than I used to, for reasons I have never had to say out loud to anyone.