Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Wastelands

I had to tell you right away: It's 1 A.M. in Paris when Henry calls, the alcoholic fumes from his warm breath travel fast across the ocean. I can always tell when he fakes his confidence, he can always tell when I fake mine. He asks me questions he already knows the answer to, they're only smoke screens and my heart is beating in a vacuum.

"I went to New York" he says, "over Christmas. I went to your address and stood outside your building for an hour" (he talks as if to an answering machine). "I only went there to see you and I didn't because... well". He breaths heavily into my ear, Stephanie frozen like a marble statue on a kitchen chair.

"You should come to Paris" he says, then hangs up. It's as much a question as an order and it echoes through the noise from the traffic outside. What should I do?



Friday, December 27, 2013

Holy ghost

She's really there when I wake up, Stephanie, a Christmas miracle in Dolce&Gabbana. She knocked on my door early Wednesday morning, I've asked her a million questions but not why she came or what she left behind. It doesn't matter and the smell of her hair makes me wish we were immortal.

We first met ten years ago in La La Land. Our mothers pretend to like each other but hers is a worse actress than mine (I overheard them talking on the phone once, she called me Antichrist). "Don't give me away" she moans plaintively, striking a pose as if nailed to the cross, and I won't. Not as long as she promises to stay.



Monday, December 23, 2013

I've built my dreams around you

Nine more days, hour after hour flickers by like scenes from a silent movie. I'm somewhere else, watching things happen as from outside of something. Reality I guess. I can't recognize myself in the mirror and sometimes in the dark I feel him standing next to me, his arm around my childish waist, my heavy head resting safely against his shoulder.

They say that New Year's is a chance to start all over. It never made sense to me in the past but my memories are slowly fading and once they're gone I will have nothing left to fight for. Maybe I need to stop talking to myself here, stop trying to put my nothingness into words on this blog.

Mother is on her way to London with Frank. "I thought I told you" she says when she calls me at 8 A.M. from the airport. I'm watching her from outside my body, the girl who's left alone for Christmas, and what frightens me the most is that nothing really seems to get to her.




Thursday, December 19, 2013

A midwinter night's dream

I slept through most of the snowfall, it doesn't mean as much now as when my father and I would escape together. I think of it as our summer house but we would spend time there during winters too, him and I, just to get away from Los Angeles and the plastic.

It would always be months since we closed up and left, the chairs in the living room would be covered with heavy fabrics and the air would smell of ice and charcoal. We would pretend it belonged to someone else and move carefully to keep from leaving any traces in the dust on the cold wooden floors.

I would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night to that soft snowfall silence. I would get up and watch him in secret from the top of the stairs as he sat there quietly alone by the fireplace. All that moved was time and the sparks from the fire reflecting in his eyes.




Saturday, December 14, 2013

If I had wings

I don't remember my skin being this pale, almost transparent. Since Chloe left I sometimes feel as if I only exist in between these lines I'm writing, but then someone send me an email saying they saw me in the street somewhere. "Outside Gusto on Greenwich, you wore a sand colored trench coat and your hair like a plundered bird's nest".

Lunch with mother and her friends was a Catholic wake on Mescaline (you'd have to be there). She had the salmon, I happened to mention that Christian Dior died choking on a fish bone. "You know how that story saddens me" she said, her voice imperceptibly trembling. "Also, it's highly disputed".

She's recently changed her afternoon drink from Brandy to Champagne and the silence from Paris is getting increasingly intrusive.




Monday, December 9, 2013

Dreams will tear us apart

A second weekend without her, staying sober seemed even more laughably absurd than emptying the last bottle of clear Russian vodka alone, so I did. Mother talks more to her flowers than with me and in this apathetic state of mine it makes perfect sense. She's calmer than usual, if it wasn't for the tranquilizing effect her Cartier de Lune always has on me I'm sure I'd be worried.

Last night I slept in Henry's Givenchy cardigan, the silence from Paris disturbs me more than I imagined. I dream about him reading my letter just before fucking a willowy French girl with wavy ginger hair and lavender satin underwear. She giggles femininely at his jokes and he promises to take her to New York over Christmas. I wake up outside my body, in the pale winter light my collarbones look just like hers.

Seeing me standing by the window in his little Brooklyn apartment reminded him of an undiscovered Vermeer painting. At least that's what he said.




Thursday, December 5, 2013

Nothing to me

I envy Chloe for doing this to me. The ghost of her still grips me in its arctic breath and my sheets smell more and more like snowfall. She's been gone a week but I can still feel her dragonfly fingers weightlessly resting between my thighs and the smell of her hair in the morning.

She read the letter I wrote to Henry and last night I posted it. "He deserves to know" she said, but I don't want him to come back to me. I want my absence to feel like hers, I want him to remember the touch of my hands and the warmth of my skin and I want it to hurt him.

I know it's selfish but hearing him say it would make me feel alive again and since she left that's all that really matters.




Monday, December 2, 2013

Point blank

A first weekend without her and everything seems different. My dresses are a lighter shade of black, the flowers in the window have lost their scent and the marble in the hallway absorbs all the light from the morning. Even the wines taste differently, more like metal and minerals than they used to

It takes me a hazy Sunday to realize what it is. Nothing has changed, it only went back to the way it was before she came. Her wardrobe is filled with mother's clothes, I look for traces of her but all I find is the numbing fear that maybe the time we spent together was nothing but a dream.

I browse through the pictures I took and there she is again, in my father's tuxedo shirt on my bed, naked in the early backlight from the balcony door and asleep in the park that summer morning. Her absence isn't just the void I've gotten used to, this time it actually and physically hurts.




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