What happens to you, would you say, when you are addressed by talk of love? Very simply put: you were far away, and now you are closer; lovers seem to have a treasure of private lore to account for the subtle reasons of this shift from distance to proximity. This radical change concerns not only space but also time: you just had the feeling of inflexible and fateful destiny – as if a flow from the past to the ever diminishing present were taking you straight to inertia, boredom, maybe death – and suddenly, a word, an attitude, a query, a posture, a je ne sais quoi, and time flows again, as if it were starting from the present, with the capacity to open the future and reinterpret the past: possibility arises; fate is overcome; you breathe; you feel enabled; you hope; you move. In the same way as the word “close” captured the different ways space is now inhabited, it is the word “present” that now seems the best way to capture what happens to you: you are present again and anew to one another.
