My dearest love,
My limbs have gone stern and old and my brain has been clouded with haze. Words get caught at the tip of my tongue and I stumble over the names and places that I keep at the pocket of my jeans.
See, memories have become so difficult for me that even picturesque scenes captured in daylight, half-baked in the confines of your red room, now collect dust at the back of my mind.
The last thing I want is to lose them forever for mortality is an unsparing, merciless thing. So, I took them out of my pockets and spread them all over where I can reach.
I took the day I first saw the beach, with sand in my feet and salt in my hair, to the conch shell that my mom keeps on the top of our tv. The waves would whisper every time I press my ear against it and I could almost taste the sea, could almost feel the sun burning upon my skin. I took the night my parents parted ways and shoved it in my childhood bedroom, covered in washed-out wallpaper and the ghost of vanilla perfume. I took my first time with a stranger, bodies pressed together at a hidden back alley in Le Marais, and pressed it in the dog-eared page of a book full of fairy tales about first-time lovers. I took the memory of my grandma’s last breath, the way her chest rose and fell, and the deafening, numbing, shattering silence of it all, and put it in an old cupboard draped with her favorite sundress and faded jewelry.
But the first time I held you. Mon amour. I took it down to the gardens, pressed it to the tips of hydrangeas, and watched it bloom in summer, in spring, unfurling until it didn’t fit any rooms or books anymore.
I tried to recite it to the stars. I tried to write it down in a poem. But I realized how foolish I have been for how could someone as bewitching as yourself be possibly contained within the spaces of finite verses?
I remember the first time we met. It was among the burgundy rows of a theatre in Rennes. Your face was bathed in blues & shadows, Maurice was playing on the screen, and a cigarette was dangling from your lips. Our introduction came in hushed whispers and muted peals of laughter.
You were younger then. You looked so beautiful and you were possibly the best thing I have ever seen that I thought it was just a fever dream. You will be the end of me.
We walked the streets of a city unfamiliar to me yet all I could think of was memorizing the topography of you. The way your lips would curve upwards, the way your eyes would disappear when you laughed. You told me you loved wallowing in words, and I told you I loved creating them.
You didn’t believe me at first. “Maybe, it’s because I only read works from dead authors,” you said. Then, good, I told you, I would qualify to be in your reading list soon.
It was almost dusk when you walked me home to my hostel. All I wanted was to kiss you, to map out the wide expanse of your back, to learn and unlearn everything about you just so I could do it all over again. I was a reckless fool. I knew how this would end. But you were full of what I’ve been searching for, and I was burning before I could put out the flame.
I knew what I was getting into, and yet I loved you anyway. When you sent me postcards filled with Rambaud’s mangled words, I loved you. When you kissed me against a wall and danced with me to Christophe’s Aline, I loved you. Even when you promised me that this would be forever, no matter how many times I told you it won’t, I loved you.
It all felt like one great, full-length feature until it didn’t. I knew what would happen in the final scene. What would the critics say, I wonder, once the credits roll in? Was it a tragedy or simply a fool’s mistake?
See, memories have become so tough for me. I am constantly falling into a black abyss. You once said you’ll never leave me alone in a bad dream. But my bad dreams are no longer just dreams, and you’re the last person that I want to see in my walking nightmares.
I can’t seem to leave you but I have to go. It’s getting harder to breathe. By the time you read this, I am already gone. I’m sorry it had to be this way. Au revoir, angel.
Yours forever,
A.
P.S. We were everything I hated in a cliché but you were once half my soul, or so I believed. If it makes it any easier, you don’t have to keep my books on your shelves anymore.
