Super model nights

On one of the antique mirrors at Lapérouse, Kate Moss has left a message for the after world: "it's 2 late 2 go 2 bed" she wrote, or carved in with something really sharp.

I tell him that story over dinner, he looks at me like he's found something to admire. I'm not sure what that is but know better than to ask. When we walk through the Jardin des Tuileries after sunset he takes my hand and holds it in his without saying a single word.

It's a beautiful night but then again, nothing lasts forever.

Lutetia

He comes to my room the day after, it should be too easy but I really felt the need to have him there.

I ask him what to wear and he picks out the perfect dress: short and black from Givenchy, Tisci's masterpiece in the softest of satins. We empty the bar at Joséphine, then head for Saint Germain in search of a place to call home. 

I haven't felt the need to watch the sun come up this strong since I left LA for what feels like a lifetime ago.

We are a storm

I don't know who spots who first. I'm in black from Lanvin, he sits at the table next to me, writing something with a glittery tourist shop ball-point pen on ivory paper. By the sheer focus I can tell it matters to him.

"What are you writing" I ask as he looks up for a fraction of a second, disturbed by a waiter putting down drinks.

"I'm not sure", he replies, "but I know how it's going to end."

"How can you know that?"

"Because it's all true."

I let the smoke from my cigarett rise slowly towards the blackening Paris skies, it's getting late but this night was clearly made for conversations over countless glasses of Burgundy wine.

"I'm Avy", I say, "nice to meet you."

Fuck you 2020

Another year that never happened, seems like the story of my life. You would think that growing older would give some insights but nothing ever changes for me. Stuck in the loop of pointless existence and never learing anything I didn't already know At least that's what it feels like but maybe I'm wrong again. Please keep reminding me of the reasons to keep on going.

Unchained melodies

I never met Anna Sorokin in person, but I know that Chloe did. We haven't really talked about it, she just mentioned it casually, in passing, like one of those pointless anecdotes you sometimes bring up only to break the silence.

Not the we ever needed it, of course. She was more than a friend to me, more like a sister or a lover, and maybe she still is although we haven't spoken or met in years. Time fades away so slowly and yet so quickly, as if to remind us of things we would prefer to forget.

I do it all the time but then something always happens to remind me, and I remember why I still have to do this, why I still need to stay on this path I've chosen, right or wrong, for better or for worse. There are times when it's felt like nothing but a waste of breath, but it always somehow comes back to this.

Pink like my heart

Every guy I ever met more than twice has insisted on buying me underwear. It started when I was 14 in LA and made a cute but all too fragile college freshman get me and Chloe alcohol. I knew he was in love with me but finally had to end it when he sent me a pair of stay-ups in the mail, with a handwritten note I've tried to forget ever since.

Some have better taste than others, but whatever they buy says something important about their personalities:

• Anything from a generic brand: you will never end up writing a novel/become an actor like you say you want

• Just a bra: you pretend like you know me just to get close enough to fuck me

• A whole set: too pretentious for your own good

I've always preferred a pair of panties. It tells me you're honest about your intentions, and if you pick the right ones I might even consider letting you see me in them.

Pictured: the pair a friend of a friend discretely slipped into my coat pocket after dinner last night.

Les nuits des Anglais

The casual contacts you have in a town like Nice. Stephanie and I are at La Merenda when suddenly this British M&A guy I met in Paris at Café de Flore once shows up as if from nowhere and offers me a drink. It's more than a year ago that I thought giving him my number was a good idea, but some people just refuse to forget the stupid things you do while drunk.

After more than a few Vesper Martinis I'm in his apartment on Rue de la Buffa, as soon as I mention growing up in LA he wants to watch Crash on his big screen TV. I tell him it's too close to home while the real reason is that I hate Sandra Bullock ever since she tried to sleep with my dad (before she was famous, obviously).

Instead he lets me go and I wander home, past the street performance on the Promenade. The night is warm and I know it will be at least until the end of August. When I get back home Stephanie is already asleep, her clothes scattered across the floor of our 5th floor room. I can see the Negresco from our balcony, thinking that maybe Henry is there, at his balcony, looking for me too.

Angels

High above the Promenade des Anglais and the sound of airplanes taking off from across the bay. We're at the Méridien with a bottle of rosé wine between us, the only thing I can drink before the end of the summer. Stephanie calmly puts down her lipstick-marked glass on the table, her polka dot Saint Laurent dress a mirage against the dark.

"I know why you keep going to new places", she says, a different kind of tone in her voice, one I can't say I've ever heard before. "I won't tell you what it is because you already know, but I want you to understand that I feel it too."

She lets the silence embrace us as we run out of oxygen to breathe. There are a million things she can say next but instead she holds back for a little too long, then looks up at me with a crooked smile that breaks my heart in two. "Either way", she giggles, "I just love making you speechless".

Une autre fois, mon amour

Every time I go to Rome I get a different feel for it, but I can never say that I love it. It's not pretty like Paris or grand like New York, but sometimes as vulgar as my childhood's LA.

Stephanie feels it too. "Let's go to Nice and get in trouble" she says, a sudden hint of madness in her emerald eyes. My only condition is that we stay away from Le Negresco, so she books the Westminster just for spite.

"Ocean view?" she asks as if she really means it like a question. I don't know how the two of us ever became friends.

For me to know

The first few days: I keep arriving at new places thinking it's just temporary, but somehow I always end up staying. Maybe my restlessness has limits after all. Stephanie doesn't complain, every time I see her it's as if nothing has happened since the last, as if nothing could ever come between us. Or perhaps we're just good at acting.

We have long lunches and dinners with her family at places I didn't know existed. They're open just for them, just for him. Never a menu, never any orders but we always get exactly what we want like it's been pre-written in stone.

I ask him if he lives in Rome to be close to the political power, i ladri di Roma. He laughs like at a clueless child.

"If you think politicians have the power," he says, "then, cara mia, you have a lot to learn about the catholic church".

Lei fece un passo indietro

Out of the blue, Stephanie calls me on a Friday night, her voice a nightingale in my tired mind. "Come to Rome" she says, so here I am on her laptop at 1:30 AM, trying to make sense of all the Limoncellos and red wine we've shared somewhere deep in the alleys of Trastevere.

We talk about Santa Monica and Clare Waight Keller, about nothing and everything except Henry. She seems happy, I pretend I'm happy too and part of me really is, just by being close to her. It's funny how months and years can pass unnoticed until one day you're back in that exact same spot like nothing ever changed.

I remember her coat on the day when we first met, the secrets we shared and the autumn. It was all so different back then, we were other people with the same voids in our hearts. And here she is now, in her nightgown and powder pink panties, singing along to upbeat songs on the radio, just like she did when we were younger.

Wake from your sleep

Snow in New York and the memories seem so distant. I forget that I was there, the streets and the smell of them. More and more seldom I think of going back, knowing that sooner or later I'll have to.

I've worn black from Givenchy all week, pre-Tisci of course. A British expat complimented my shoes at Café de la Paix, in my current state it was more than enough to follow him home. The last time a man noticed my heels I was 17 in LA and probably shouldn't have fucked him, but back then I remember it felt like destiny.

The Brit told me his name was Steven but I called him Neil because it suited him better. We watched La La Land in his apartment on Rue du Four, I cried at the end and fell asleep on his lap while he tried his best to comfort me, his hand in my hair, a bottle of Californian Pinot Noir like blood flowing through my system. It was sweet.

Paradise Lost

I came to Paris looking for something and whatever it was I still haven't found it. I'm as lost here as I am anywhere, as much on the run as I've been all my life.

Christmas and New Year's came and went, I can't remember what I did or who I was with but my favorite dresses are all torn and the heels on my Chanel's, the ones I got from mother, are an inch shorter than they used to be. My phone is full of text messages I can't interpret and pictures I never took. I haven't even bothered checking my voice mail.

And on Sundays, while everyone is getting ready to pick up the remaining pieces of their lives, I'm still here, in the bar of some hotel, watching my reflection in the mirror as it changes into something I no longer recognize. I'm still here, starting to make up stories about the life I never knew I wanted to have.

Les Confessions

Marie Antoinette lost her head 224 years ago today. I would eat cake if that was something she actually said, but Champagne seems more suitable to the occasion.

Nights are getting darker and not just in my riotous mind. I sometimes come to think of California and the way we'd plan our imminent escape, Chloe and I. When I finally left it was because of her but she followed me across the wasteland to New York and in to my childhood dreams of falling through the skies together. She never called to wish me a happy birthday and it hurt me more than any fragmented memory of numbing sleeplessness on the beaches down in Santa Monica. The lights that never went out and the sound of the waves and her breaths on the back of my neck.

I follow the queen through rue Saint-Honoré past the boutiques all the way to the Place de la Concorde where she died. Wind in my hair and across the open spaces, all the stone and the traffic and the gray outside the gates to the Tuileries Gardens. I always hated this place.

Live and let die

Another year older and I should have grown up a long time ago. S calls me before anyone else, from her aunt's house in Florence. She sounds hysterical but happy and I miss her a lot more than she misses me.

For my twelfth birthday mother gave me a signed copy of The Sun Also Rises. It was one of those rare times she didn't try to buy my loyalty with designer clothes and credit cards, and probably the only time her gifts actually meant something. My father had read it to me that summer on the beaches near Antibes where we had our last fleeting moments of happiness together, just the three of us.

September kept closing in on our family and I didn't know then that the people I loved the most would all soon become ghosts to me, alive or dead, near or on other sides of the planet. They were all just trying to escape and I learned much later that the one thing you can never really run away from is yourself.

Remembrance

I'm in the Luxembourg Garden writing postcards to some version of myself, a cup of coffee with vodka getting cold in my hands. The sun sets in red and lilac across the river, bars and restaurants filling up with people I'll never know. I look for mother in the crowd of shadows, I look for Henry and I look for Carl but no one's there and the air is getting lighter.

I've been so fucking tired of the sound of my own voice that I let others do the talking. It's amazing how badly people long for someone to listen. I know how they feel because I used to be there but I lost my way and ended up here, silenced by my own thoughts, unable to let go of the future.

Another summer ended, I stopped counting them the day he died. Remembering what he told me just days before it happened is the only thing that keeps me going. "My darling Avy" he said, "don't ever stop dreaming of the things you really want."

Running up that hill

The heat wave in June made me want to leave Paris for good but now that it's cooler I might just stay a little while longer. I rarely leave the room before 6 PM anyway, if I ever eat breakfast in the restaurant it's because I'm still awake from the night before.

I'm out Monday, somewhere in Marais north of Rue Étienne Marcel. The bar is closing when a man tries to talk to me, first in French, then in a broken English that suggests he's from southern Spain. He gets increasingly intrusive as I ignore him and ends up rhetorically asking how a chatte like me sleeps at night. I want to say "Diazepam" but I guess it's wasted on him.

Henry's shadow still chases me across the boulevards in Saint-Germain. I don't know that he's actually here but I keep feeling his presence like an electric chock through my every bone. Maybe it's just phantom pains from an amputated part of the soul, or maybe he's out there looking for me too.

April fool

Every time I feel like posting something I'm missing the words and when I find them again I've always lost the will to write. And in spite of my silence you're still here, leaving me darling comments to read when I'm feeling lonely.

Paris is a strange sort of fairy tale these days; dark and hostile, a world of its own sporadically lit up by glimmers of hope that things will soon be better. I keep telling people the same old
stories over and over and instead of making friends I get sick of hearing my own voice.

I spend most of my time in a triangle between Printemps, Café de Flore and Avenue Montaigne. La Coupole is treacherous ground since I spotted the back of his head in the mirror by the bar. They call me sometimes to ask where I am, I guess it's some form of compliment. Either way I'm slowly awakened from my winter's sleep, getting ready to live just a little, step by step until the summer.  

Whatever makes it alright

Did January even happen? I might have slept through it with my eyes open, countless bottles of Burgundy wine emptying themselves on my bedside table. I had little choice after the Christmas I had, New Year's I can't even remember. I might have woken up in a two floor apartment off Boulevard Raspail but the details are fuzzy to say the least.

I also have several messages and missed calls from mother, all of them from 24 hours between January 1st and 2nd. Needless to say I never returned them. Whether it was a nightmare or something that actually occurred, the last time I saw her she told me to stop looking for men that remind her of my father.

I can't decide if Paris is the love of my love or a whore dressed in fishnet stockings and purple bustiers. Depends on my mood I guess, only I can't remember what I've felt over the past 30 days. I don't know how much more of this I can take. Maybe I'll end up like him, tired of everything, afraid of nothing, waiting in vain for something to burst in this hummingbird heard of mine.

Mannequins

Thursday afternoon, I'm in the Luxembourg Garden writing postcards to friends I lost a lifetime ago. The air smells of spring and graveyards, I'm the only one in sight wearing all black (and Philipp Plein stiletto heels). Asian tourists in beige parkas are shamelessly taking pictures of me like I'm part of the scenery. I'm not even trying to fake a smile.

Then, just as I'm about to pack up and leave, I spot him on the other end of the fountain. He's in his Wayfarer shades and the Etro scarf I got him for Christmas two years ago, alone and purposely heading nowhere. He looks right through me for what feels like forever, then turns away and disappears like a magician in the crowds, leaving me broken and breathless and cold. It's the first time I've seen him since I returned to Paris, even though I've spent months looking for him in the streets of Saint-Germain.

Whether it's a hollow fantasy or the remains of too many beautiful dreams, I stumble towards my hotel thinking that maybe he saw me and is now secretly following me back. I only stop waiting after an hour sitting on the floor outside my room, the cleaning staff carelessly stepping over me like I'm trash. I guess they've seen far worse sides of me.