Belle Laide

He showed up ostensibly to just say hi, in the middle of the evening, the lamp dim, the air full blast cold, our feet bare and barely clean.

He came to check in, up and down, and though I’ve been tired and on my own sort of weak-hearted bender, really I’d like to think it might have been to see if I still looked the same, had the same lilt, smelled like flowers, felt soft to the touch and still had a bony back, whatever it is that boys think of girls that they lose. And I had that new mix, all that old French rap, and clean sheets and he had cloudy sky slits for eyes and I missed him even as he was there, a whisper ghost with longish hair, longer than it should have been in a week’s time and the same familiar shirt, and I feel perennially as though I will wade through water instead of air forever if I have to, because I don’t know what I want but I do, I don’t know how to help those who also don’t know, and it struck me that there are so many people out there to love, so many people who are right in some ways and completely wrong in others and it never stops any of us from fusing with them anyway.

And it was one of those rushes that keeps pushing, to a thumping soundtrack and to a barely babbling conversation, brain and brook, we had these needs, and only if we had screwed up more, for real, could we be mad, could we take it all away. Tough enough as it is, and it’s all our own undoing. We knew it. We did it anyway. We anticipated the end as soon as we heard the starting shot and just leapt. Shit. It was stupid. It was ugly. As belle laide as Marc Jacobs aims.

Because you can’t start over when you never really began. You can’t heal when the wound was imparted by your own thoughtless hand. We wanted to conduct. We wanted to gesticulate and scream, talk nonsense, skip over cars, laugh too loud. We did that. We did it too much and to little end. Let’s play, we thought. But playing isn’t real. In context yes, but in the rest of this mess, play is escape, and there is no escape from New York.