Thursday, November 28, 2013

Cinderella

"Leaving is the hardest thing" she said once, "and I've always hated happy endings".

I didn't expect her to say goodbye, she left me a burgundy lipstick kiss on the chin, a pack of white roses and a handwritten note on her perfumed pillow. I won't tell you what was in it because it would reveal things about her that I don't want anyone else to know. She reminded me of the seaside, the cold sand and the sudden rush when her little doll hand first slid into mine.

When I close my eyes now I see her moving seamlessly to Nouvelle Vague's Dance With Me, her snake skin heels kicked off and left behind like a nightmare. She's the only girl I've ever known that looks taller in her bare feet.



Monday, November 25, 2013

Love is a brand

"Give me one reason to be happy", she said. I could think of a few more.


Monday, November 18, 2013

She walks in beauty like the night

She comes back late, Chloe, I'm violently awakened by her razor silhouette fixed in the artificial back light from the doorway. She stands there like a marble statue for the smallest part of an eternity before soundlessly stepping out of her wrinkled dress, leaving it behind in a branded blood pool on the naked floor.

"It's so dark" she whispers as she climbs into bed, touches down softly like a butterfly behind me and puts her warm little doll hand between my thighs. I would stop a waterfall before going back to sleep, memories of other nights like these are keeping me amplified and wide awake in the deafening silence. She's as close as Henry used to be and the microscopic twitches from her piano fingers are slowly making me wet.

"I dreamed about fireflies" she says in the morning, "or maybe they were stars". She's gone now, I answered with a lie just to keep her smiling.




Friday, November 15, 2013

Elephant

I've been told I taste like revolution, since then I always drink on Fridays.

I meet Chloe for lunch in the Meatpacking District, the dark alcohol rushing through my veins helps dissolve the acrid hipster smell around the table. She leaves everything she ordered untouched apart from the tall glass of rye whiskey, then pays the bill with the firm's credit card.

"He's here" she says, suddenly, "I'm seeing him on Sunday". It's been the elephant in the room for weeks now, hearing her say it should make it easier to bear but it doesn't. We both know it's a funeral, later I wander around the McQueen store without any sense of direction, picking out snow white roses for Sunday.





Monday, November 11, 2013

Raptures

Lately I've found spaces to breathe in but something toxic is coming to disrupt the silence. I feel it in the way she whispers over the phone on early weekend mornings, Chloe, the little tornadoes of despair she creates and scatters across the wooden floors.

She used to sleep so quietly like on a death bed, now she wakes me by accident as she gets up before dawn on Saturdays. "It's C" she said when I asked her. Always "C", never "father", never "dad".

Just moments ago now: she and I in the dusk, the last reflections of sunlight on her apple skin as she looks right through me. "Do you ever get tired of running?" she says, then turns to pick up a cigarette from her jacket pocket. I wait for her to light it but she never does. This silence is thicker than blood.




Friday, November 8, 2013

De côté de chez lui

From time to time I come to think of Henry. Remembering what he looks like is slowly getting harder, when I imagine his voice I hear the irregular heartbeat from a broken telephone line and nothing more. I stopped collecting photographs of people I know when my father died, the fear of forgetting them keeps me from falling asleep too easily.

I tried reading Proust once. Henry said it changed his life, he doesn't call me as often as he used to and the last time we spoke he called me Odette. His flowers are scentless now, just like the Givenchy cardigan he left behind like a Trojan horse in my night stand drawer.

Last week I bought a stamp for the letter I wrote. The thought of sending it to him gives some form of meaning to the words again, after all this wasted time.



Monday, November 4, 2013

Night of the living dead

New York on Halloween reminds me of downtown Los Angeles on, well, any given day. The significant difference is that La La Land actually scares me.

Chloe claims to have nothing in common with her colleagues but insisted on spending the evening with a dozen of them in an obscure studio apartment in Tribecca. "You know how it is" she says but I really don't. Their semi scripted soap opera monologues about themselves (Kanye West playing in the background) went on for an hour before someone wanted to know what I do. I told him about the joy in finding a perfect balance between Diazepam and Zoloft to make life seem a little less surreal. He didn't ask any more questions.

I woke up in my dress one or two days later, I couldn't tell, and went for a walk through the park. All around were smiling people, if the buildings had crumbled down it could have drowned out the noise.





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