Paris, 2004. You were supposed to meet me at the hotel, hours ago. It is 2:30 in the morning - outside rain fills the streets of the busy Latin Quarter and the smell of wet pavement drifts into my open second story window. I sit on the windowsill, knees pulled to my chest, chain smoking and shivering. The rain will beat on all night but it won't deter them, the drunks, the revelers, the bodies on the move in the search for sex or drugs or some other kind of fix.
The bleary-eyed kid at the front desk has twice put his computer games on pause and let me check my email for some message from you. I can see him watching my face bathed in the blue light flooding from the monitor. He looks down at me and smiles kindly in a sympathetic, knowing way. He thinks I have been stood up.
To be honest, the longer I wait the more the thought enters my mind, replacing the initial images of you mugged in a dark and stinking metro, your bruised and swelling body floating somewhere in the Seine, bits of your flesh and your hair mashed with broken glass on a sidewalk.
Perhaps you have decided to cash your ticket in and head to Budapest, where we would have been going had you had your way in the planning of this trip. I told you to trust me, that you would love Paris. I told you it's exactly like they say it is: cheap red wine and living off baguettes and cheese, music and art of every kind at every hour, the perfect city to serve as your urban muse. I told you about the second-hand bookstores, my favourite restaurants, dusty and cavernous basements where the jazz plays 'til dawn. Grabbing a Lonely Planet and trying the more tested tourist route, I shook the book in your face. "The Sorbonne", I cried. "A whole museum dedicated to Picasso. Bloody fucking Foucault!"
Maybe you didn't believe me. Maybe I was wrong about what would inspire you, would inspire us, would fuel this crazy journey that we started, this strange thing born of your naiveté and my restlessness and blind passion. Lately we have both been at a loss for how to sustain it and in your absence I can feel it slowing, can sense it about to leave me stranded in this city made for lovers, mocking me. Maybe you have decided to stay in Liverpool, in that little flat, finding that suddenly you can paint again in my absence. Maybe it wasn't that city or its dirty fog or bleak winters that stifled us, but me all along, or better put, your wanting to be free of me.
I start to get angry. How could you just not show? I plan everything I will say, the betrayal I will try to convey. I begin to ready my tears for battle, knowing that they will always reduce you, that they will cause you to cave a little, replace your bravery with concern and make you want to draw me closer. Our love is a war of attrition.
At 3:58 a.m. I am pacing, fighting with you in my mind's eye, worked up to the point that I don't hear you turn the key in the lock or open the door. "Hey," you mumble, and I nearly jump out of my skin. My anger melts to a mix of guilt and relief in your presence, my eyes searching every surface of your skin for some sign of mistreatment before I can even open my mouth to ask what happened, ask where you've been.
There was a storm. Your plane had to land at another airport and you were bussed in. Your cab hit a motorcyclist and you don't speak French and you had to ask a dozen people before you could even find out you were on the wrong side of the city. I had forgotten to give you the phone number for the hotel. You have a fever, and you are exhausted.
Your body is cold and stiff under the covers. You lie with your back to me, and I stay awake watching your shoulders rise and fall. I try not to blink until I can sense that your breathing has deepened and I am sure you have fallen asleep.
It rains the whole time we are in Paris.
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