Between the bed and the window, in that space that smells roses and rien que pour toi, the morning let’s her hair down. She is so close that I can reach her skin with the tip of my fingers.
I know, his book and the fame it brought him. The book in which he made me — the me that he imagined — the main character.
He was fascinated by the purple of my makeup and the yellows of my cobra who used to erect the upper portion of her body to greet him every time he visited.
I do not know what demons he tried to exorcise. In the heat of those summer afternoons, he used to sip his sangria and attempt to find almost religious justifications for what he called my ecstatic existence; an existence populated with the richness and succulence of the Mediterranean literature and void of bullet points.
His acute shyness and his need to overcome the incapacity to love beyond nightly adventures used to ring in my ears like some unhinged marimba lamenting the loss of a pipe.
The dress that I wear in page twenty-seven. That dress and the heart-shaped red stone pierced with a hole for suspension I used to wrap around my neck. I found that stone in a church yard. I was too young. Perhaps an older version of me would have made him a better writer. Do not laugh. You are too handsome when you laugh.
In the end he managed to do something special. He invented the name of a perfume and made me wear it in every page of his book: rien que pour toi.
I hid his book somewhere in the library.
Yet, every morning, in the space between the bed and the window, it still smells rien que pour toi.
Excerpt from my new manuscript of love poems and short prose.
My book Passions: Love Poems and Other Writings featured in San Francisco Book Review and Manhattan Book Review.
@Gabriela Marie Milton
