May 21 2008
What do I miss about…
France: – The long walks along the Seine in chilly autumn nights, crossing the Pont des Arts to the Cour du Louvre, starting small in the esthetically harmonious lights that wet the walker’s appetite, only to enter the Grand Cour and lose my senses in synesthetic ecstasy before the pyramidal shape and the tones of light and shadow it casts on the quiet pool.
- The 67 bus to Pigalle, a metaphor to classical Paris, a place that would be so distant and so close to me as a student, walking down rue Lepic to her place, where a funny picture of a Michael Jackson-like friend or relative would preside over the table across which she would supervise the words to my thesis, as I got irreversibly lost in her perfume and stood only half an inch away from drowning in the nape of her neck.
- The day we knew it was meant to be, shortly after I pleaded to her to discontinue the use of French between us and caress my ears with her Sicilian accent, orgasmic in its essence and fugitive in its state, with her destined to be so far away from me, and love sentenced not to be. Est-ce que je t’ai gênée? I let her hand touch mine in simple complicity, knowing I had been the one to kiss her the night before.
- A picnic in spring, a good, cheap Côte du Rhône from Franprix to counterbalance the chilly breeze, a mix of pungent, hard and soft fromages of the best possible cru for the standard student pocket, and the hope that the moon would continue to shed its light on us, inexperienced souls convinced that Paris was a woman. Great futures awaiting and, behind the sharp angle of L’Ile Saint Louis, the distant foreboding of goodbye.
- The ride in Line 13 to Saint-Denis, the courses on Austen and the Brontes, Woolf and I, alone, as I returned to the small room at the Maison de l’INA, warmed dinner and plunged into other readings, battling against Orlando Furioso from an unkempt English translation, burying my nose in the secrets of Knole, and letting Sackville speak from her poems and her letters of her complicity with the genius at Tavistock Square.
