The great beauty (II)

Summer turned to November so quickly while I wasted time sleepwalking through the cul-de-sacs of Paris and our lives. The pictures I've taken are all of places and things, no body parts except my own, covered in skin and transparent light colored fabrics. Under them the scar on my shoulder looks like a gentle brush stroke.

Henry is equally absent, I refuse to photograph him because I want to be able to forget him some day. The color of his eyes and the way his hair falls when he bows down to kiss me. Not that he'd ever allow me, he prefers watching me undress through the lens of my camera and I prefer letting him.

I'm so much younger in the photos my father took of me once, before he suddenly stopped. "Beauty" he said, "can't be captured, only remembered". That morning I had been chasing butterflies across the fields around our summer house for the very last time and in a way it felt like growing up.