Wastelands

I had to tell you right away: It's 1 A.M. in Paris when Henry calls, the alcoholic fumes from his warm breath travel fast across the ocean. I can always tell when he fakes his confidence, he can always tell when I fake mine. He asks me questions he already knows the answer to, they're only smoke screens and my heart is beating in a vacuum.

"I went to New York" he says, "over Christmas. I went to your address and stood outside your building for an hour" (he talks as if to an answering machine). "I only went there to see you and I didn't because... well". He breaths heavily into my ear, Stephanie frozen like a marble statue on a kitchen chair.

"You should come to Paris" he says, then hangs up. It's as much a question as an order and it echoes through the noise from the traffic outside. What should I do?

Holy ghost

She's really there when I wake up, Stephanie, a Christmas miracle in Dolce&Gabbana. She knocked on my door early Wednesday morning, I've asked her a million questions but not why she came or what she left behind. It doesn't matter and the smell of her hair makes me wish we were immortal.

We first met ten years ago in La La Land. Our mothers pretend to like each other but hers is a worse actress than mine (I overheard them talking on the phone once, she called me Antichrist). "Don't give me away" she moans plaintively, striking a pose as if nailed to the cross, and I won't. Not as long as she promises to stay.

I've built my dreams around you

Nine more days, hour after hour flickers by like scenes from a silent movie. I'm somewhere else, watching things happen as from outside of something. Reality I guess. I can't recognize myself in the mirror and sometimes in the dark I feel him standing next to me, his arm around my childish waist, my heavy head resting safely against his shoulder.

They say that New Year's is a chance to start all over. It never made sense to me in the past but my memories are slowly fading and once they're gone I will have nothing left to fight for. Maybe I need to stop talking to myself here, stop trying to put my nothingness into words on this blog.

Mother is on her way to London with Frank. "I thought I told you" she says when she calls me at 8 A.M. from the airport. I'm watching her from outside my body, the girl who's left alone for Christmas, and what frightens me the most is that nothing really seems to get to her.

A midwinter night's dream

I slept through most of the snowfall, it doesn't mean as much now as when my father and I would escape together. I think of it as our summer house but we would spend time there during winters too, him and I, just to get away from Los Angeles and the plastic.

It would always be months since we closed up and left, the chairs in the living room would be covered with heavy fabrics and the air would smell of ice and charcoal. We would pretend it belonged to someone else and move carefully to keep from leaving any traces in the dust on the cold wooden floors.

I would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night to that soft snowfall silence. I would get up and watch him in secret from the top of the stairs as he sat there quietly alone by the fireplace. All that moved was time and the sparks from the fire reflecting in his eyes.

If I had wings

I don't remember my skin being this pale, almost transparent. Since Chloe left I sometimes feel as if I only exist in between these lines I'm writing, but then someone send me an email saying they saw me in the street somewhere. "Outside Gusto on Greenwich, you wore a sand colored trench coat and your hair like a plundered bird's nest".

Lunch with mother and her friends was a Catholic wake on Mescaline (you'd have to be there). She had the salmon, I happened to mention that Christian Dior died choking on a fish bone. "You know how that story saddens me" she said, her voice imperceptibly trembling. "Also, it's highly disputed".

She's recently changed her afternoon drink from Brandy to Champagne and the silence from Paris is getting increasingly intrusive.

Dreams will tear us apart

A second weekend without her, staying sober seemed even more laughably absurd than emptying the last bottle of clear Russian vodka alone, so I did. Mother talks more to her flowers than with me and in this apathetic state of mine it makes perfect sense. She's calmer than usual, if it wasn't for the tranquilizing effect her Cartier de Lune always has on me I'm sure I'd be worried.

Last night I slept in Henry's Givenchy cardigan, the silence from Paris disturbs me more than I imagined. I dream about him reading my letter just before fucking a willowy French girl with wavy ginger hair and lavender satin underwear. She giggles femininely at his jokes and he promises to take her to New York over Christmas. I wake up outside my body, in the pale winter light my collarbones look just like hers.

Seeing me standing by the window in his little Brooklyn apartment reminded him of an undiscovered Vermeer painting. At least that's what he said.

Nothing to me

I envy Chloe for doing this to me. The ghost of her still grips me in its arctic breath and my sheets smell more and more like snowfall. She's been gone a week but I can still feel her dragonfly fingers weightlessly resting between my thighs and the smell of her hair in the morning.

She read the letter I wrote to Henry and last night I posted it. "He deserves to know" she said, but I don't want him to come back to me. I want my absence to feel like hers, I want him to remember the touch of my hands and the warmth of my skin and I want it to hurt him.

I know it's selfish but hearing him say it would make me feel alive again and since she left that's all that really matters.

Point blank

A first weekend without her and everything seems different. My dresses are a lighter shade of black, the flowers in the window have lost their scent and the marble in the hallway absorbs all the light from the morning. Even the wines taste differently, more like metal and minerals than they used to

It takes me a hazy Sunday to realize what it is. Nothing has changed, it only went back to the way it was before she came. Her wardrobe is filled with mother's clothes, I look for traces of her but all I find is the numbing fear that maybe the time we spent together was nothing but a dream.

I browse through the pictures I took and there she is again, in my father's tuxedo shirt on my bed, naked in the early backlight from the balcony door and asleep in the park that summer morning. Her absence isn't just the void I've gotten used to, this time it actually and physically hurts.

Cinderella

"Leaving is the hardest thing" she said once, "and I've always hated happy endings".

I didn't expect her to say goodbye, she left me a burgundy lipstick kiss on the chin, a pack of white roses and a handwritten note on her perfumed pillow. I won't tell you what was in it because it would reveal things about her that I don't want anyone else to know. She reminded me of the seaside, the cold sand and the sudden rush when her little doll hand first slid into mine.

When I close my eyes now I see her moving seamlessly to Nouvelle Vague's Dance With Me, her snake skin heels kicked off and left behind like a nightmare. She's the only girl I've ever known that looks taller in her bare feet.

Love is a brand

"Give me one reason to be happy", she said. I could think of a few more.

She walks in beauty like the night

She comes back late, Chloe, I'm violently awakened by her razor silhouette fixed in the artificial back light from the doorway. She stands there like a marble statue for the smallest part of an eternity before soundlessly stepping out of her wrinkled dress, leaving it behind in a branded blood pool on the naked floor.

"It's so dark" she whispers as she climbs into bed, touches down softly like a butterfly behind me and puts her warm little doll hand between my thighs. I would stop a waterfall before going back to sleep, memories of other nights like these are keeping me amplified and wide awake in the deafening silence. She's as close as Henry used to be and the microscopic twitches from her piano fingers are slowly making me wet.

"I dreamed about fireflies" she says in the morning, "or maybe they were stars". She's gone now, I answered with a lie just to keep her smiling.

Elephant

I've been told I taste like revolution, since then I always drink on Fridays.

I meet Chloe for lunch in the Meatpacking District, the dark alcohol rushing through my veins helps dissolve the acrid hipster smell around the table. She leaves everything she ordered untouched apart from the tall glass of rye whiskey, then pays the bill with the firm's credit card.

"He's here" she says, suddenly, "I'm seeing him on Sunday". It's been the elephant in the room for weeks now, hearing her say it should make it easier to bear but it doesn't. We both know it's a funeral, later I wander around the McQueen store without any sense of direction, picking out snow white roses for Sunday.

Raptures

Lately I've found spaces to breathe in but something toxic is coming to disrupt the silence. I feel it in the way she whispers over the phone on early weekend mornings, Chloe, the little tornadoes of despair she creates and scatters across the wooden floors.

She used to sleep so quietly like on a death bed, now she wakes me by accident as she gets up before dawn on Saturdays. "It's C" she said when I asked her. Always "C", never "father", never "dad".

Just moments ago now: she and I in the dusk, the last reflections of sunlight on her apple skin as she looks right through me. "Do you ever get tired of running?" she says, then turns to pick up a cigarette from her jacket pocket. I wait for her to light it but she never does. This silence is thicker than blood.

De côté de chez lui

From time to time I come to think of Henry. Remembering what he looks like is slowly getting harder, when I imagine his voice I hear the irregular heartbeat from a broken telephone line and nothing more. I stopped collecting photographs of people I know when my father died, the fear of forgetting them keeps me from falling asleep too easily.

I tried reading Proust once. Henry said it changed his life, he doesn't call me as often as he used to and the last time we spoke he called me Odette. His flowers are scentless now, just like the Givenchy cardigan he left behind like a Trojan horse in my night stand drawer.

Last week I bought a stamp for the letter I wrote. The thought of sending it to him gives some form of meaning to the words again, after all this wasted time.

Night of the living dead

New York on Halloween reminds me of downtown Los Angeles on, well, any given day. The significant difference is that La La Land actually scares me.

Chloe claims to have nothing in common with her colleagues but insisted on spending the evening with a dozen of them in an obscure studio apartment in Tribecca. "You know how it is" she says but I really don't. Their semi scripted soap opera monologues about themselves (Kanye West playing in the background) went on for an hour before someone wanted to know what I do. I told him about the joy in finding a perfect balance between Diazepam and Zoloft to make life seem a little less surreal. He didn't ask any more questions.

I woke up in my dress one or two days later, I couldn't tell, and went for a walk through the park. All around were smiling people, if the buildings had crumbled down it could have drowned out the noise.

Don't look back in anger

Chloe. It's not her real name in case you've been trying to find her (I know that some of you tried LinkedIn, and yes, she is there but not among my connections). I've been afraid of losing her ever since she asked if we could be unhappy together. She told me about her father and I told her about mine.

She lets me write about her because I promised to give away her deepest secrets some day. It's a work in progress, I know she doesn't tell me everything but filling in the blanks with my wildest fantasies is my favorite waste of time.

I remember asking her what she hated the most. "H&M, hip-hop and Julia Roberts" she said, without even thinking, as if she could read my mind. We were twelve, breathing each other's air in the dark somewhere on Venice Beach. Her skin smelled like apples.

Dust to dust

There's a certain beauty to how mother's half empty liquor bottles glow like amber in 8 AM sunshine. I sometimes get up early to have breakfast with Chloe before she disappears to her ad agency work downtown. She came back to me at the end of summer but something was different in the way she looked over her shoulder when we walked together, arm in arm.

It's autumn now, she stills pours brandy in her morning coffee but less so than before. "It's C" she says in a resigned exhalation when I ask. She always uses his first name when she talks about him, never father or dad, as if those words would cut her tongue if she spoke them.

In a few hours I will hear her keys in the lock again, her heels making music on the hallway marble, her coat thrown carelessly on my bed. She will ask me to smoke with her on the balcony and the cool winds will dance under our dresses. Everything that begins must come to an end, even for us, but not just yet unless we let it.

Copycat

Chloe the copywriter is jealous of me, it's a cute look for her. She found a link to my blog in the good examples section of an online content writing course. Apparently I write "great first lines", and I didn't even ask for it (that's what bothers her the most). "Here I am trying to write something meaningful for orange juice" she says, "and I can't even picture the fucking product without vodka in it."

I try to offer some comfort by reminding her that at least she gets paid to write. "So do you" she says, "people love you. That's payment enough". I guess she's right, but sometimes I wish I really was that marketing campaign someone accused me of being.

So to the dear people at Alexander McQueen, Moschino or Prada: if you ever feel like using me in your marketing, you know where to find me. I'm the girl wearing your clothes on the dance floor later tonight.

You and I are growing old

I would love to say that early Saturday mornings under the lights have always been about escapism. Following her footsteps through the silence and the calm at dawn still eradicates a part of the void in my heart, but for every new week it gets a little harder.

She's in the spotlight somewhere in East Village, I'm drawn to the darkness away from the noise. Her, moving like cigarette smoke from body to body, an eery feeling of being watched creeps up on me. I make my way through the crowds to talk to her, as I put my hand on her damp naked shoulder I hear a whisper close to my ear, a masculine voice piercing through the music: "I know all your secrets".

I turn around and there's no one there, just a hazy vibrating blur of black and blue. Six hours to sunrise.

Versus

I remember the good things mother has done for me through the clothes she wore when she did them.

We stopped talking to each other when it happened but she never compromised with her sense of style. She would silently roam around the house like the shadow of a ghost but always wrapped in sweeping air light chiffon dresses, her paralytic blood red lips an open wound against the translucency of her ivory skin.

A month passed, I hadn't heard her talk until she loudly defended him at a night time garden party somewhere in Silver Lake. When Suzy Menkes called Versace a parody of itself it hurt me because I remember mother when her voice echoed through the darkness. The silk embroidered Medusa jacket she wore, 5 inch snake skin heels that helped elevate her far above the rest of them.

The words she knows the tune she hums

This morning is an overexposure. Chloe opens the blinds at eleven, in the pale light and the dust my naked skin looks like melted porcelain. I watch her by the window through the filtered air, her nymphic body moves in a blurred slow motion as my eyes adjust from the midnight darkness.

We came home late after drinks and watched Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine in bed with a half bottle of rum. I'm not going to say that he based Cate Blanchett's character on my mother, but I do know that they met more than once in the late 70's. Through the paper walls I can hear her singing My Funny Valentine, the velvety softness in her voice makes her sound younger than she is.

I see dead people

It's been fourteen days since mother mentioned Nice, every syllable still echoes in my mind like the high frequency noise of unanswered questions. I only dream in short fragments about heavy rains on the Promenade des Anglais, my father wearing black as he disappears in the distance and the haze. Why didn't he tell me?

I browse through his photographs again, the colors have faded and the paper feels like polished fabric on my fingertips. He's never in them but they help me remember the way he talked to me, always as if I was so much older.

Chloe sleeps next to me, sometimes she wakes up and grabs my insomniac hands in the dark. "Don't worry" she says, "I know that he loved you". I do too but I have a feeling I won't sleep through an entire night again before that echoing subsides.

Dolce

We're three again, after an antiseptic summer in between these airtight walls. The temperature is slowly dropping, I come back home from a semi-conscious stroll down 5th and there she is like a mirage by the window, Chloe. "I knocked" she says, it answers the questions I never asked and in a heartbeat we're back to where we started earlier this spring.

I can tell that something has happened to her but I'm leaving it to rest until she wants to tell me. It's the way it's always worked between the two of us. She's on my bed covered in silk and lace, gently stroking her fingertips across Paolo Roversi's Alta Moda Vogue cover.

"Let's get into trouble" she says, "I have drugs". It's going to be a beautiful weekend.