Les Confessions

Marie Antoinette lost her head 224 years ago today. I would eat cake if that was something she actually said, but Champagne seems more suitable to the occasion.

Nights are getting darker and not just in my riotous mind. I sometimes come to think of California and the way we'd plan our imminent escape, Chloe and I. When I finally left it was because of her but she followed me across the wasteland to New York and in to my childhood dreams of falling through the skies together. She never called to wish me a happy birthday and it hurt me more than any fragmented memory of numbing sleeplessness on the beaches down in Santa Monica. The lights that never went out and the sound of the waves and her breaths on the back of my neck.

I follow the queen through rue Saint-Honoré past the boutiques all the way to the Place de la Concorde where she died. Wind in my hair and across the open spaces, all the stone and the traffic and the gray outside the gates to the Tuileries Gardens. I always hated this place.

Live and let die

Another year older and I should have grown up a long time ago. S calls me before anyone else, from her aunt's house in Florence. She sounds hysterical but happy and I miss her a lot more than she misses me.

For my twelfth birthday mother gave me a signed copy of The Sun Also Rises. It was one of those rare times she didn't try to buy my loyalty with designer clothes and credit cards, and probably the only time her gifts actually meant something. My father had read it to me that summer on the beaches near Antibes where we had our last fleeting moments of happiness together, just the three of us.

September kept closing in on our family and I didn't know then that the people I loved the most would all soon become ghosts to me, alive or dead, near or on other sides of the planet. They were all just trying to escape and I learned much later that the one thing you can never really run away from is yourself.