and so she goes..

and so the rain began, a burning desire kept quiet under the drizzle of a cool night sky.

Paris in the winter, beautifully frozen, terribly bleak, the city of love, the city of ruin, my city of heartache. she had been gone 3 weeks now and neither of us were to be the same again.

in the spring we would sneak into bookshops to escape the cold, I remember holding her gently as she traced her fingers across books with pretty covers and titles that made us laugh. her hand in mine, her skin warm, her eyes warmer, a stolen kiss somewhere between always and never.

and I loved her, because it was her, because it was me.

at night the Seine shimmered with despair like a scene from Gatsby, a river I once walked with the promise of youth now howled in silence. poetry on the banks, empty wine bottles on the grass, an interlude of time that we hoped would never end before the sunrise.

yet I remembered the summer so vividly, hours on the beach, talking till night fell, holding hands under pink skies. a gentle sweat on her lip, the window ajar, the outline of her torso under the sheet, trace of youth across her skin, the way that only I knew how her body felt and I thought nobody else ever would.

her lips on mine, my arm around her waist as she slept, the rise and fall of her chest, the flickering of a candle by the door. the smell of vanilla and washed hair, the way she looked at me like nobody had ever looked at me before. the beauty in the struggle, the way I loved her more than I loved myself.

the hours of screaming, the endless tears, that sinking feeling when I heard her laugh. the sleepless nights, the songs that never sounded the same and the places that had never felt more empty. the movies that I could never see again, the moments in time that now existed only in my mind, the reality that was broken and shattered into pieces that would never really fit back together.

maybe in time she said as she left, her train passing through the Gare Du Nord and onto somewhere in northern Italy, and with it an idea that would haunt me forever. the idea of a world where I was me and she was her and only together did it all ever really make sense.