Don't look back in anger

Chloe. It's not her real name in case you've been trying to find her (I know that some of you tried LinkedIn, and yes, she is there but not among my connections). I've been afraid of losing her ever since she asked if we could be unhappy together. She told me about her father and I told her about mine.

She lets me write about her because I promised to give away her deepest secrets some day. It's a work in progress, I know she doesn't tell me everything but filling in the blanks with my wildest fantasies is my favorite waste of time.

I remember asking her what she hated the most. "H&M, hip-hop and Julia Roberts" she said, without even thinking, as if she could read my mind. We were twelve, breathing each other's air in the dark somewhere on Venice Beach. Her skin smelled like apples.

Dust to dust

There's a certain beauty to how mother's half empty liquor bottles glow like amber in 8 AM sunshine. I sometimes get up early to have breakfast with Chloe before she disappears to her ad agency work downtown. She came back to me at the end of summer but something was different in the way she looked over her shoulder when we walked together, arm in arm.

It's autumn now, she stills pours brandy in her morning coffee but less so than before. "It's C" she says in a resigned exhalation when I ask. She always uses his first name when she talks about him, never father or dad, as if those words would cut her tongue if she spoke them.

In a few hours I will hear her keys in the lock again, her heels making music on the hallway marble, her coat thrown carelessly on my bed. She will ask me to smoke with her on the balcony and the cool winds will dance under our dresses. Everything that begins must come to an end, even for us, but not just yet unless we let it.

Copycat

Chloe the copywriter is jealous of me, it's a cute look for her. She found a link to my blog in the good examples section of an online content writing course. Apparently I write "great first lines", and I didn't even ask for it (that's what bothers her the most). "Here I am trying to write something meaningful for orange juice" she says, "and I can't even picture the fucking product without vodka in it."

I try to offer some comfort by reminding her that at least she gets paid to write. "So do you" she says, "people love you. That's payment enough". I guess she's right, but sometimes I wish I really was that marketing campaign someone accused me of being.

So to the dear people at Alexander McQueen, Moschino or Prada: if you ever feel like using me in your marketing, you know where to find me. I'm the girl wearing your clothes on the dance floor later tonight.

You and I are growing old

I would love to say that early Saturday mornings under the lights have always been about escapism. Following her footsteps through the silence and the calm at dawn still eradicates a part of the void in my heart, but for every new week it gets a little harder.

She's in the spotlight somewhere in East Village, I'm drawn to the darkness away from the noise. Her, moving like cigarette smoke from body to body, an eery feeling of being watched creeps up on me. I make my way through the crowds to talk to her, as I put my hand on her damp naked shoulder I hear a whisper close to my ear, a masculine voice piercing through the music: "I know all your secrets".

I turn around and there's no one there, just a hazy vibrating blur of black and blue. Six hours to sunrise.

Versus

I remember the good things mother has done for me through the clothes she wore when she did them.

We stopped talking to each other when it happened but she never compromised with her sense of style. She would silently roam around the house like the shadow of a ghost but always wrapped in sweeping air light chiffon dresses, her paralytic blood red lips an open wound against the translucency of her ivory skin.

A month passed, I hadn't heard her talk until she loudly defended him at a night time garden party somewhere in Silver Lake. When Suzy Menkes called Versace a parody of itself it hurt me because I remember mother when her voice echoed through the darkness. The silk embroidered Medusa jacket she wore, 5 inch snake skin heels that helped elevate her far above the rest of them.

The words she knows the tune she hums

This morning is an overexposure. Chloe opens the blinds at eleven, in the pale light and the dust my naked skin looks like melted porcelain. I watch her by the window through the filtered air, her nymphic body moves in a blurred slow motion as my eyes adjust from the midnight darkness.

We came home late after drinks and watched Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine in bed with a half bottle of rum. I'm not going to say that he based Cate Blanchett's character on my mother, but I do know that they met more than once in the late 70's. Through the paper walls I can hear her singing My Funny Valentine, the velvety softness in her voice makes her sound younger than she is.

I see dead people

It's been fourteen days since mother mentioned Nice, every syllable still echoes in my mind like the high frequency noise of unanswered questions. I only dream in short fragments about heavy rains on the Promenade des Anglais, my father wearing black as he disappears in the distance and the haze. Why didn't he tell me?

I browse through his photographs again, the colors have faded and the paper feels like polished fabric on my fingertips. He's never in them but they help me remember the way he talked to me, always as if I was so much older.

Chloe sleeps next to me, sometimes she wakes up and grabs my insomniac hands in the dark. "Don't worry" she says, "I know that he loved you". I do too but I have a feeling I won't sleep through an entire night again before that echoing subsides.