Friday, March 28, 2014

Sarajevo

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.




Sunday, March 23, 2014

Transitions

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.




Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Who killed L'Wren?

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.




Sunday, March 16, 2014

Substance

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.




Sunday, March 9, 2014

For Chloe, whenever I may find her

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.




Tuesday, March 4, 2014

Kremlin dreams

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.




Saturday, March 1, 2014

Haussmann chronicles

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".




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