My hostel sheets smell like regret and Chanel No. 5 sprayed like insecticide. I suspect it was me. The scent now mingles with the peach juice that trickled down my thigh this morning, as if my body itself was tired of holding form.
It’s hard to write in Paris when you’re sticky, humiliated, and vaguely possessed by the ghost of a man who’s still very much alive.
He was my mentor, sort of: old enough he should be irrelevant, but attractive enough to disrupt that fact. He looked like he belonged in the margin of a medieval manuscript, elbowing cherubs and taking long, meaningful pauses before disagreeing with you. He wore unseasonal scarves. He recited Rilke aloud, unprompted, as if life were an audition for a radio play no one was casting. Once, he called me “too clever for my own good,” and then proceeded to ignore every idea I ever offered him.
Naturally, I wanted him to ruin my life.
I misread everything: his tone, his glances, the way he once touched my shoulder as if I were a particularly delicate antique. It’s possible he just liked the sound of his own voice and I was a conveniently placed audience with oversized eyes.
Someone told him I was obsessed. He told me this as if reading aloud a fortune cookie: “Apparently, you’re obsessed with me.”
I laughed. A sound like crushed insects.
He looked pleased. Or maybe his face just does that.
By the canal, I sweat through linen and contemplate leaping in. Not from sadness—more for theatrical effect. A sort of baptism into bitterness.
A man sits beside me. He smells like shampoo marketed to tired mothers. He reads slowly, lips moving. I think, “This is the kind of man who wouldn’t complicate my life,” and immediately hate him for it.
I try to write, but the page is smug. All I manage is:
“The peach juice is inside my notebook now.”
This feels like a metaphor. Let it be one.
He never asked me out. Never kissed me. Never even stood too close. Still, I rearranged my thoughts to accommodate his absence. He lived inside every unwritten sentence. A squatter in my syntax.
He once said, “I worry about you,” and I carried that line like a relic, as if concern were some higher form of love. Looking back, I think he just didn’t want me to make a scene.
The truth is: I liked the idea of falling in love with someone who couldn’t possibly love me back. It felt safer. Like throwing yourself at a locked door and blaming the hinges.
What I felt wasn’t even romantic. It was logistical. Like: “If I give him exactly 13.5% of my brilliance and 100% of my trauma, surely something will open up.”
It didn’t.
Instead, I got a headache and an itchy sun rash.
There are pigeons here that strut like minor aristocrats. One of them made eye contact with me today, and I swear it looked concerned. I took it as a sign that I’m not writing enough.
I try to revise this scene in my mind: He tells me he’s been in love with me all along. I pretend to be surprised. We kiss. The pigeons applaud.
But that version doesn’t end with me Googling “how to get peach juice out of Moleskine paper.”
Eventually, I’ll leave Paris with nothing but a tan line shaped like a shoulder bag and a vague understanding of boundaries.
Here’s what I know:
- He didn’t love me. Not even a little.
- I made a performance out of pretending he almost could.
- There are worse things than unrequited feelings.
- Like hostel roommates who snore in iambic pentameter.
- Like sticky thighs and no working fan.
- Like seeing him again and saying, with complete composure, “Ah, yes. I wrote about you.”
That he will not get the pleasure of asking what I wrote.
