When she can’t sleep at night, she tries to remember the details of all the rooms where she has slept: the one she shared with her parents until the age of thirteen, the ones at the university residence and the Annecy apartment facing the cemetery. She starts at the door and makes her way around the walls. The objects that appear are always linked to gestures and singular facts: in her room at the summer camp where she’d worked as a counselor, the mirror over the sink where some boy counselors had written in her red Diamond Enamel toothpaste, ‘Long live whores’; the blue lamp in her room in Rome that gave her an electrical shock each time she turned it on. In those rooms, she never sees herself with the clarity of photos, but blurred as in a film on an encrypted TV channel. Or she sees a silhouette, a hairstyle, movements – leaning out of a window, washing her hair – and positions – sitting at a desk or lying on a bed. Sometimes she manages to feel she is back inside her former body, not the way one is in dreams, but more as if she were inside the ‘glorious body’ of the Catholic religion, which was supposed to resurrect after death with no sensation of pain or pleasure, heat, cold, or the urge to urinate. She doesn’t know what she wants from these inventories, except maybe through the accumulation of memories of objects, to again become the person she was at such and such a time.

The Years, Annie Ernaux