L'absence et le retour

A first-person narrative depicts the slow return to consciousness after a severe illness, rendered through fragmentary sensory impressions—glints of light, scents, sounds—and a compulsive attention to small, familiar objects. Feverish torments alternate with icy shocks while fleeting visions and distorted human figures provoke fear and disorientation. Gradually, scattered memories of excessive work, pain, and nightmares reassemble around a persistent question of identity, and the narrator struggles to reconnect bodily sensation, recollection, and external reality in an effort to regain self-awareness and understand what was lost during the episode.