"Listen to them... the children of the night... what music they make!" Dracula, Bram Stoker.

Insofar as I didn’t know Rozenn much at all, I can say I’ve been quite affected by her suicide… I’ve been thinking of her since I heard the news yesterday, and the thought of her prevented me from sleeping for a long time last night…

I kept thinking of how I would face the class again, without her…. Should I say a word to my pupils, or just hush up her name while calling everybody else… I really couldn’t imagine crossing it out of the list, just like that, as if dying was enough to make your name erased from where it belonged to and to fade the slightest memory of a whole existence.

When you die, you lose your life, but those who remain still own fragments of it… it is as if your life as a whole dissolved into hundreds of pieces that hundreds of people would be the guardians of, until they disappear in their turn, taking along their treasures and secrets.

I am one of them, I keep in myself the fleeting vision of her face… that’s why I cannot resolve to draw a line across her name, which stands as an evidence of her existence.

 

So this morning, after repeating in my head all I was going to say, several times, I just stood there in front of the class, and all I could actually utter was “I’m going to take the roll call, it hurts me not to be able to call Rozenn, it truly hurts me.”

I don’t know if I did well or not, but really, that’s about all I could take… and, on the brink of crying, I started to call them one after the other, skipping the name of Rozenn.