“He put glitter in my life, it was my only positive perspective”

First day

I am the son of farmers, and I became a teacher in the north of France. I came out at 20, after my year of Erasmus. My mother immediately accepted my homosexuality, my father less so. This summer, I returned to my parents in the west of France because the doctors diagnosed my mother with generalized, incurable cancer. The outlook is bad. So I became a helper, immersed in a “total experience” like those defined by the English sociologist Erving Goffman.

I am also in the process of separating from the one who had been my companion for six years, Adrien. I’m tough, intransigent at times, but his lack of commitment is a problem for me, I’m losing confidence in him. He’s already gone twice. At the end of June, I log on to Tinder, I meet men, we go for drinks. There’s Aurélien, who’s funny but who I don’t like, Théophile, whom I kiss, even though I’m not single yet. We spend the night together, I don’t like to sleep alone, it’s ugly the nights alone. We don’t sleep together, I can’t seem to want to when it’s not a matter of a successful emotional relationship.

It’s dark, I light a cigarette, I listen to music, and I feel this euphoria of a beginning. I live again. He takes me somewhere else.

In Brittany, Adrien does not support me much. I’m writing him a three-page letter, I need him to take a step towards me. “If things don’t change, the only solution is to separate. » He relies on this single sentence and calls me: “Okay, we split up. “I told you that I love you and that I want more though”, I answered him. But he ignores my opinion, he rushes into the breach, as if he was afraid to take the initiative to leave me. He had sworn to my mother never again to put me in the state in which he had put me when he had left me the two previous times. The first time, in particular, I found myself drunk, screaming with sadness in the streets until I bit my arm. My friends, worried about my immense distress, had even called my brother. I have no recollection of this incident.

So it’s over with Adrien. I take care of my mother, who resists and is a little better in this early fall. I reinstall Tinder. From the Breton countryside, it is necessary to widen the perimeter to 100 kilometers to catch profiles in the big cities around. I speak with guys from Rennes, Vannes or Brest. I match with Titouan: on his first photo, he is crouched next to an ice floe, on the second he is blowing between his hands with glaciers in the background, on the third he has light jeans and, I believe, Brown eyes.

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