Photo by Me
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I enjoyed her brown skin and black hair. Her gray eyes and pink finger nails. I liked how she speckled her English with Spanish y viceversa. How her insides contradicted her outside.
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I sat with my bag of dominoes at the bar down the street waiting for a partner to play. I read my favorite author (you know the one) as I wait. “Keep on reading baby, it’s going to be awhile,” you say as you blow kisses from across the East River.
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Swedish Girls often lose their English tongues.
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I imagine. I imagine. I imagine. On the train to Copenhagen. Copenhagen. Copenhagen. You embracing me at Central Station. Attacking me with kisses, your belly full with our baby.
On the beach with our little boy. Him doing something funny, you laughing hysterically unaware that I am watching you two through the pages of my book. Unaware of how much my heart fills when you laugh the same way you laughed at me that first day we met in the cafe in Stockholm. My last day in Stockholm. You told me of your dreams of moving to Berlin. You didn’t know it but they became my dreams as well at that moment. That was the day I fell in love with Stockholm. Or a girl in Stockholm. Or you. Or you in any city in the world. Just you. I told you to write me. Write me. Write me.
Berlin. Berlin. Berlin.
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Love letters from the past found him in his dreams like ghosts drawn to the light. His light, which he left on always. So one day she could find him. If only she would look.
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She had a sad beauty to her. A beauty that clung to her suggesting a once proud knockout. But don’t be mistaken, she did not desperately grasp at her beauty like the old hags with their bright lipstick and massive amounts of makeup not fooling anyone. She could easily have done without the daily reminder of the past. The past that often times is best forgotten. But what is best is not always easy, especially for a fading beauty.
She wished she didn’t have to look at herself like an old photograph that started to yellow at the corners. Instead she wished she could throw the photograph on top of the timber in the roaring stove and let it burn like the rest of the world.
She wanted to burn.
To burn like the rest of the world.
