Spiked morning coffee with myself at de Flore. It's
the eye of the hurricane, the outskirts of a perfect storm and a
thousand trivial conversations dilute the imminent threat of another
war. A woman accuses me of eavesdropping, if shots were fired outside
she wouldn't notice over the deafening sound of her own self-absorbed
banalities.
Later with Henry, I mention LA in passing over dinner
somewhere in Montparnasse. "Do you miss it", he asks, I want to say no
but it's only a part of the truth. I miss the nights we spent in the
cold sand by the ocean, the things we would talk about and the smell of
her chestnut hair. I would close my eyes and imagine us together in the
water, holding hands beneath the surface in the dark. Her grip is firm
at first then gradually loosens until she lets go and all that remains
is a soporific silence and the waves.
Thursday marked the first day of spring and it
must be a relief after the snowfalls and the cold on the other end of
the Atlantic. Here, the weather hasn't changed significantly since I
came, much like the things we talk about, much like the things we don't.
He
brought me to Paris to tell me something other than "I love you",
whatever it is (or was) he couldn't say with the distance and the sea
between us. I never thought I'd stay this long but as days turn to weeks
and months the memory of New York gradually transforms to one from a
seemingly different life. The smells and the colors become less
tangible, more like the scattered traces of a dream.
On some
afternoons we walk together by the river banks, my hand a feather in his
and I try to imagine them as definitive moments of a fleeting youth.
The lilac of the sky reflects in the water, tomorrow this light will
last a little longer.
When my mother and father first met she asked
him if he liked Mick Jagger. She took him from New York to Russia and
Los Angeles before that violent afternoon at the height of autumn. He's
gone now but the phantom pains from my amputated wings will always be
there to remind me.
They started gradually, for so many years
before them I was manically afraid of forgetting. We would escape
together, just him and me chasing tail lights in the dark somewhere. I
tried to mimic those moments with someone else but I could never lay
down and rest the way I wanted to, the way I always could with him.
When
I try now I can hear my heart beating so loud it sounds like thunder. I
remember music playing and I remember the words and how they seemed to
be written just for us.
I've grown older and nothing really gets to me
but those sudden gunshots. The high lasts for a week until it wears off
like a sugar rush, I'm a stray cat restlessly looking for something to
put me off balance again. It takes more than it used to, the surest sign
of a chronic addiction.
Henry is good to me but my abstinence
makes me want to go out alone and sleep with strangers. I still dream in
disjointed fragments, memories of nightmares linger in between the
stints but in the morning they're always gone.
It makes sense of
course, my father spent his entire life on the run. Mother stopped when
he died but I know she has it in her too. I miss her frostiness but if I
called her now she'd just go on about how much she hates Paris.
It hits me like a gunshot when I see her in a
crowd outside the Musée Jacquemart-André. I'm not prepared, she's a tear
in the curtain for a fraction of a second and then she's gone. I look
for her, the fiery color of her hair and her silhouette, traces of
Balmain's Eau d'Ivoire in the pale air and the transparency.
The
universe contracts, I pick up my phone to call her, the rhythm of the
dial tone an irregular heartbeat and nobody answers. Sending a text
message takes forever with my fingers trembling uncontrollably, it's
just after three in the morning in Los Angeles and I ask her where she
is.
Five more hours pass in restless slow motion and another
gunshot when the display lights up from an unread message. "I'm always
where you are" she says and nothing more. I haven't cried like this
since Galliano got fired from Dior.
I sometimes think my body hurts this way from
missing Chloe, but it might just be the stale Crimean winds coming in
from the east. We spent 48 hours in Odessa a few years ago, the first
time we decided to act on that invasive restlessness we had both felt
for as long as we could remember.
"Close your eyes and point
somewhere" she said over a map of the world. "That's where we'll go". We
explored smoky strip clubs (all of them disguised as smoky restaurants)
and drank Champagne in our room at the Bristol. The staff humored us
because we weren't Russian mafia, because we flirted shamelessly and
paid with crisp American dollar bills.
Now I can feel the thunder
closing in again, Henry follows the news with his usual distracted
interest. "Napoleon seems unhappy" he says. The lingering cold from the
winter still wakes me in the mornings before the sun comes out and takes
some of the pain away.
His sister returns from a two-week trip across
the Atlantic and the temperature drops in a heartbeat. We're alone in
the living room when she leans over me to reach for a book, her warm
agitated breath in my ear and she whispers: "he doesn't love you".
I
never thought that he did because in that one aspect we're exactly
alike, him and I. Somewhere along the way the lights faded and the
fluctuations evened out. We can't remember when it happened but it's
only in our dreams that we recall what it felt like to be sad, to be
happy, to hate or to love. We cling to each other because no one else
would ever fully understand.
Later we're at Printemps, browsing
through Tisci's SS14 collection. I close my eyes and run my fingertips
across the sheer silk and the satin but everything feels exactly the
same. I turn to him.
"Your sister hates me".
"No" he says, his voice a silent snowfall. "She hates herself".
