Must be the clouds in my eyes

He didn't look back as he walked through the gate, Henry. Not that I expected him to when I pictured the scene in my head but the way it turned out I almost imagined he would. The last hours spent together and the things we said, the things we didn't say and his Dior cologne, it's all infused in my summer clothes and the skin underneath.

I still can't shake the feeling: us holding hands in a convenience store on 8th Avenue (me holding his more than anything), minutes away from the green mile cab ride through Lincoln tunnel all the way to Newark. He pays for the water, jokes around with the clerk and holds the door for me, the perfect gentleman with that perfect effortlessness.

As I pass him he leans into me, buries his face in my hair and whispers through the noise and the traffic: "I love you so much". All the rest is silence and an impermeable darkness before my eyes, like breathing under water or trying to wake up from a bad dream. I don't remember speaking to him before we part at the airport and he's walking away from me, it's the first of July and he doesn't look back.

Unfolding

Henry casually talking to me from across a restaurant table - a scene so familiar the feeling of déjà vu fails to surprise me. He never just breaks the silence, Henry, he violently rips it apart and every word is a plane crash in the desert. He talks about Paris and the apartment near the Jardin des Serres d'Auteuil. His sister has sent him pictures of parquet floors, floral tapestries and a small balcony facing the Boulogne forest.

In four days he's leaving but the distance between us is already endless. I will miss him, he will forget me and a summer later it will all start over again. He speaks and I try to pay attention but in between the stories and the musings my mind gets lost in the realization that I never knew he had a sister.

A midsummer daydream

The longest day of the year has passed, from now it will only get darker up until Christmas. My father used to tell me about the Nordic midnight sun and how summer days would seem magically endless when he was little.

He would be quiet for a moment, then smile and tell me he'd take me there some day. There are as many stories as there are unkept promises, locked away in history, frozen in time like amber insects.

I don't know what he and mother talked about on that first trip they made together, but people that knew him said he came back a different man. A little less than a year later they bought the summer house where we would spend so many magical nights in the dark just waiting for the morning and the hazy daylight.

At your most beautiful

Chloe doesn't have to work but she does it anyway just to prove a point. She cashes the checks her father sends her every month, puts them in an account and quietly goes on with her life. "Guilt is a worthless currency" she says when I ask her, but I've seen the balances and most people would call that a minor fortune.

She writes copy for an agency full of writers that want to be authors, this weekend she got up at seven on a Sunday to work on a pitch. "At first I thought it was funny", she tells me, "how everyone there complains about working for the sake of money alone. Now it's just sad. I'm the only one that doesn't want to write the next great American novel."

I can't tell you about the plans she has for the blood money she's saving, but the ambition alone intrigues me. Madness is at its most beautiful when dressed in silk chiffon and raspberry colored lipstick.

The stranger

I don't know why but summer nights here make the streets seem claustrophobic, all I hear is people talking about me when I pass them ("wasn't that...?"). It creeps up inside me sometimes, that restlessness and the chronic will to escape.

"Let's do it", Chloe says to me under the lights on the balcony, "let's go somewhere and never let them find us". She was always the vain romantic. I remember late August nights in the sand by the ocean when we were kids and the things she would see in the clouds above our heads. To me they were just clouds.

We would lay next to each other in the dark and breathe together, the warm winds would dance under our summer dresses and the waves in the water would sound like voices, telling me to escape. I remember closing my eyes and trying to feel my own heart beating and how I couldn't. I learned to understand early on that it was always just the calm before a storm.