Introduction

Sporadically throughout the 1980s, I catalogued my existence via notebooks, cassette tapes, odd scraps of paper, and so on.
Transforming some of these rough diary entries into literary works, as I did recently, produced "La Tres Chere Qui M'a Suivit" ("She Dear One Who Followed Me") which is featured below, and which came into existence in a very slightly different form in late 2006 at the blogster.com website. Since then, it has been subject to only very minor alternations.
However, it existed initially as a series of scrawled notes based on conversations in which I'd engaged in 1982 or '82 with someone who was once a very dear friend. One of these conversations followed an incident in which I'd made something of a public spectacle of myself, which distressed my sympathetic friend.
The first section begins with "It was she", and ends with "you could hurt me, you know". It was composed using extracts from several separate conversations, all of which were also edited, while the second, taken from a single edited conversation begins with "You are a Don Juan" and culminates with "there's something so...so...your look". The final section, also culled from a single conversation, was reproduced verbatim.
Certain portions of the piece were translated from the original French, this being my friend's native tongue.
As a whole, it provides something of an insight into my condition in those times, some ten years before I became a Christian.

She Dear One Who Followed Me

It was she, bless her,
who followed me...
she'd been crying...
she's too good for me,
that's for sure...
"Your friends
are too good to you...
it makes me sick
to see them...
you don't really give...
you indulge in conversation,
but your mind
is always elsewhere,
ticking over.
You could hurt me,
you know...
You are a Don Juan,
so much.
Like him, you have
no desires...
I think you have
deep fears...
There's something so...so...
your look.
It's not that
you're empty...
but that there is
an omnipresent sadness
about you, a fatality..."