He thought it was their first date; she knew it was their anniversary. The streets were drenched in lights as the people eagerly waited for the coming of Christmas and New Year's Eve. But in all the vivacity of the streets, Amié was nothing but the shadow between the lights.
The streets hummed with the same bustling excitement as the melody in his mind. All around, he saw the many shades of the heart painted onto the faces of the passerby, all a shade of a joy he couldn't see in himself. Accursed with acute forgetfulness, he could only catch the echo of home before his memories burn themselves to ash, leaving only the weight of the memories behind.
Pieces of himself dissolved into the sea of his life, uniting with what would always be endlessly unknown to him. He had barely the capacity to recognize himself in a mirror, seeing what he can only describe as a blank canvas wounded with the colors that could never stain true. As his inner world remained a wasteland of meaning, so too did the dark city illumined by humanity present itself to him as the ghost of a dream.
Fangs of coldness buried their way into the marrow of his bones, arousing his excitement to meet her even more. Things as simple as the mark of the seasons was enough to ground him to the earth, to not let his mind float into fantasy. But such groundedness came with its own dread; the wicked knowledge of the colorless wasteland, the unknowable ocean, whatever territory he could imagine to fathom the unfathomable.
Whether it was in the stars or in the dirt, he could find nothing to grasp as the world’s light shone through him, beyond him, away from him. Which is why the mere idea of something new presented the idea of something vast, endless, and most of all, free. In another’s company, he wouldn’t need to be reminded of the emptiness of his identity, painting the blank canvas in the colors of the other’s radiant heart.
An ethereal blood hissed through the heart of the city and its many veins as he made his way to the café. It was the incessant rush of life flowing through the people, through the streets, even through the architecture. In its guttural hum, a saturnine sense pressed against him; a mountain of faceless memories balanced on a glass effigy.
Every feature of the world around him seemed like a book overflowing with words and symbols with meanings lost in time. Despite being mute of meaning, their deafening howls delivered a vivid flash of affect into him with lightning explosiveness, striking his memory’s already barren soil. Everywhere he went, he felt as though he had been there before, but knowing that he was unable to remember its details, Aimé remained saddled with a consciousness drenched in burning shadows.
The scent of winter cleansed his spirits, imbuing it with a vitality amidst nature’s rest. It captured the scent of nature’s dreams and their graceful effervescence, inspiring his own spirit to cleanse itself and be reborn for new possibilities; a cycle that carved the shape of his existence. With a note on his writing desk explaining the time and place of his date, together with a saturated diary entry detailing his past self’s angle, he felt his palms accumulate warmth and sweat in his nervosity.
Although he couldn’t see himself writing that, nor possessed any knowledge of how he encountered her, he threw himself into the unknown and let the nervous storm of the sublime wash over him. A strange, almost feral urge to ensconce himself in her company took over him the louder the world around him became, the louder the cacophonous echoes of memories bubbled beneath his skin. At the entrance of the large café, the world fell still.
Upon entering, Aimé greeted the staff with a warm smile, squinting his eyes enough so as to hide the truth behind them. As they marked his name and showed him to a seat fitting his description, he told them to show his date Zoé to his table whenever she arrived. Perhaps it was something in the golden glow of the lights or how they caressed the homely wooden interior interwoven with creamy shades, washing him with a vast nostalgia.
To the horizon of his consciousness, dawn’s golden breath moved through him with the grace of the smoke whispering from his cigarette. The ephemeral blue smoke danced into oblivion, drowning in the eternal dawn of the café where time finally stopped to tend to his wounds. A sense of permanence finally embraced him, even if it lasted as long as the blue dance of smoke. Its lingering taste alone was enough to remind him that he was alive, even as an ever-growing catacomb of memories.
Outside, the blue became stained by a deep black, giving the warm lights of the café a chance to shine brighter. In the meantime, drenched in thought, he stared at the soft pack of cigarettes he placed on the table and the ashtray, already tainted by ash. His mind circled around the pack, recognizing its every curve and contour who imprinted itself similar to a lover’s designs. In all the shapes of the surroundings that screamed deaf memories to him, its profound possession over his psyche helped ground him in a way not much else could, in a way a lover would.
In the interactions of others in the café whose hearts ebbed and flowed like seas, he couldn’t fathom how they could possibly tame the untamable. Perhaps, he thought, that they were merely tamed by the untamable, by that which he sees in the mirror which others only encounter in their deathbeds.
From the entrance of the homely area, she arrived, standing out amongst the rest like the full moon among a sea of stars. In spite of his condition, he immediately recognized her, as if she absorbed his psychic fires and sculpted it into luminescence with a brilliant smile. Unaware of the ash accumulating on his cigarette, he studied how her dark golden locks flowed onto her shoulders, highlighting the light glittering in her oceanic eyes and how her coat complemented her figure.
He quickly tapped the ashes into the tray, and the soft blue of the smoke synchronized with the gentle blue of her gaze as she took a seat in front of him. While there was a surreal comfort in her presence, a wild nervosity still took hold of him. He suddenly became aware of his features; of the grey shadows beneath his dark eyes and the slight imperfections in his face that made it seem that he was fused with different designs. But her voice snuffed those fires out with equal grace.
“Do you already know what both of you would like to order?” The waiter asked, slightly leaning towards them due to his tall stature.
With clockwork efficiency, both of them asked for the same black coffee, sparking a sweet fire in Aimé’s chest. When the waiter left, she turned to him with a dawning sun glowing in her eyes.
“Hello, Mr. Writer. How are you?”
A smile split the corners of his lips. As if hiding the crack on a sculpture, he covered his lips for a moment until the smile faded. Again, the fiery gaze of insecurity illuminated to him with painful clarity how offensive his features were to only himself. When he turned his head to see his own reflection, there was an amalgam of mysteries in the mirror, echoing her words to him.
“Writer? How do you know about that?”
Her little laugh outclassed the warmth of the café’s lighting, kindling the hearth in his soul he forgot was ever there.
“Little chapters of your story get published in the newspapers. I read them every Monday morning. That and your wonderful little poems too in other newspapers.”
“And which story is that?”
Before she even made her playful remark, he could see its silhouette dancing on her lips.
“Is this a date or one of those trivia tests?”
Her soothing gesture of the hand immediately dampened his nervous apologizing.
“I’m just playing with you, no worries.”
“I just… lose track because of how much I write. Most of it never reaches the light of day.”
“Oh, really?”
The air between them felt heavier as she crossed her legs and leaned in, resting her picturesque face in her hand. A thought flashed like lightning before him, imagining how her fingers could travel the sharp features of his cheek and jawbone. He threw it away just as quickly as it came, orienting himself to her desire that cracked his deepest parts open. To his surprise, he dared to tread that inner wasteland he feared this time, with her beside him.
“It’s not as interesting as it sounds. They’re mostly just unorganized bodies of work that crumble because I can’t give them a spine. But when I’m lucky, I use elements of them into works that do have more stability and structure. Those are the ones worth telling.”
Afraid of speaking too much, he grew quiet, his gaze wandering to the people around him that flicker and dance like flames with a vitality he did his best to emulate in words. But he couldn’t truly tear his attention away from the warmth of her body’s language and her heart’s words, invading every corner of his nerves.
“Would you like a cigarette?” Aimé asked, the soft pack crackling beneath the tap of his finger.
“No thank you, not yet. I’d like to have it with my coffee.”
A softer, meticulously crafted smile formed on his lips, one that he felt wouldn’t disfigure his features.
“I do the same.”
Just as he mentioned that, he saw their order coming towards them and being placed before them. He thanked the waiter, and in doing so saw a blinding, burning glimmer of life behind that man’s forced machinations. Again, he saw his reflection in a distant mirror and encountered the deafening silence of himself. But when oriented to her, it vanished for a moment, turning that silence into the sweetest melody.
Before he lit his cigarette, he offered her one first and took a sip of his coffee. Its soothing bitterness caressed his tension in just the right way, giving his nervous spirit wings to soar at the first breath of smoke. The hum of the café’s liveliness seemed less threatening, less invasive than before, muffled by the lowered sensitivity to it all. In enveloping his presence with hers, most of the pains he felt vanished, giving him the faint awareness that such pains are purely perceptual and nothing more. It did not matter if his eyes were uneven or the shadows under his eyes were deep; her blue eyes dissolved all such trivialities, sculpting him in the beauty of her smile.
“Are there any large stories you haven’t been able to use again? As in something so radically new that has never reached the surface?”
The way she balanced her chin on her interlaced fingers and tilted her head to make her eyes catch the golden lights filled Aimé with a feeling as brilliant as the light glitter in her gaze. Aimé absorbed the image of how her resting cigarette’s smoke danced towards her eyes, giving her azure gaze its ethereal breath. In all his days of wandering aimlessly without a place to call home, he managed to find it in the eyes of this stranger. He shuffled in his seat, realizing how his waistcoat threatened to crush his ribs with its tightness.
“Is this a date or an interview?”
The most charming giggle sparkled out of her chest at the mirroring of her earlier question, thawing the hoarfrost in his chest in return. Something in her laugh shone a light of the connection they shared, shining a light on how traces of her marked his mind, sculpting the way that he was. He thought, for a moment, that he found his innermost light in her.
Just as his imagery of grace incarnate took shape, a violent crack emerged in the form of an ineffable sorrow whispering from behind her gaze. Heaven’s mirage shattered to pieces, crystalizing in all the tears he saw twinkling in the horizon of her heart. At the end of their flow towards each other, in their ebb away, he let out a gravely chuckle as he tapped his cigarette into the ashtray.
“I don’t think I have the energy for large stories; I can delve deep, but not go broad. It’d take too much time, too much work, and would stunt the career I’ve miraculously been able to build for myself.”
“Don’t downgrade yourself like that; you’ve earned your prolific career.”
“I didn’t have a choice.”
He gives her a crooked smile to soothe his touched nerves, but also to ease her worries. He didn’t understand why he was so open with her nor did he understand what she was wrestling with behind all of her expressions. In spite of her graceful demeanor, a veil was lifted, and he could hear an ocean roar in her most subtle actions.
“If you’ve read my works then you must know of my… unfortunate condition, right?”
Contrary to her usual behaviour, she gave him a terse little nod with her head, reminding him of an anxious student afraid of giving a wrong answer. Her unusually acute expression cut deeply, but he couldn’t tell what it reached inside of him. He thought as he sipped his coffee that she might just be nervous due to his position.
“Then you know the cross I bear?”
A sweetly painful expression ebbed and flowed with a quiet timelessness on her face, turning to shock once she realized how close her hand was to his on the table. Before he was able to pick up on her spike of fright, she took a calm but deep sip of her coffee. When she put it back on the table, she began to speak.
“Journalists love to make mythic figures out of real people; it’s a very sad thing.”
She looked at the ashtray as she tapped her cigarette into it with a heavy strike of her index finger.
“Do you actually enjoy the mythos they have created of you, Salvat?”
Her face melted into a smile she was afraid would grow too big when she saw his face blossom for a sunny snicker. Even though he knew that name was but another mask, the way her voice dyed it made her playful spirit soak into his marrow, kindling a sweet sensation throughout his entirety.
“Please, don’t use that name,” he said, drowning his nervousness with a smile and a puff of smoke. Its silver ribbons danced out of his lips as he continued.
“It’s just a pseudonym, another mask to me, nothing more. Amié-Noël is fine, or one of the two, whatever you prefer.”
The soft nature which blossomed from his rugged exterior cracked open a softness in herself Zoé feared would blossom in the same way. The subtle warmth she allowed to radiate from her mannerisms was enough to shelter the blazing sun of affect beneath her skin.
“Whatever you wish, Aimé.”
Nothing else had the power to untangle his mind the way her voice penetrated him with his own name. While burdened with the constant sense of his name being an empty sound for an empty vessel, she perfumed it with such vitality that it positively rushed throughout him. He felt her voice dancing like fire in the marrow of his mind, revealing to him the blazing sun buried in her own marrow.
“I’m sorry, what was your initial question?”
Somehow, in the storm of his mind, he found it again.
“Right, the myth, the myth…”
Her infectious laugh continued to possess his heart in a way he couldn’t fully fathom, taking another drag of his cigarette to give all that he experienced a less saturated appearance. After crushing his cigarette in the ashtray, he chewed on the question, twisting his lips as he tried to come up with a proper answer.
“I mean, it’s nice in a way, but mostly in an awful way. With the myth, I don’t need to be vulnerable, which gives me some sense of safety, but at the same time, especially as a writer, you crave to have a proper connection to the world that can only come from vulnerability. Just because it’s a mask doesn’t mean that it’s a lie, either; it’s merely another side of the whole. A necessary side that makes the whole what it is in the end; a side of the whole that contains the entirety of the whole.”
Aware of how excessive his answer was, he plucked another cigarette from the soft pack and reached for his lighter so as to burn his embarrassment to ashes. In the sweltering silence, he noticed how she didn’t seem disturbed, but rather enchanted by his response in spite of what he saw as weighty nonsense. Just as she was able to set his spirit ablaze, so too was she able to tame them in the same breath.
"That's very fascinating,” she replied as she gazed deeply into his dark eyes, infusing him with a sensation so serene and potent that it made the smoke of tobacco feel like nothing. Smoke trickled from his slightly parted lips as he took in the sublime image of the warmth of the café’s lights and its clients’ chatter with her in the middle, blossoming like the twilight sun.
“You know, it is mostly because of your writings that I have dabbled into writing poetry of my own.”
“Oh really?” Aimé nearly stood up from his seat upon hearing that. The jarringly bubbly and innocent expression twinkled from the deepest part of him, striking an equally deep cord within herself.
“Tell me, what have you written about?”
The energy of his enthusiasm disoriented her for a moment, dismantling her into silence. It was in the subtle crack of her armor where he noticed that she was armoring herself to begin with, turning the fires of her breath within him into a painful inferno.
He chided himself for his explosive psyche, taking a deep drag of his cigarette as he cast aside his poisonous thoughts. An almost feral fury pierced his skull, but he couldn't begin to fathom why. Instead, he directed his attention to her, turning the blind ferocity into a blinding passion for the beautifully unknown.
“Oh it’s, it’s nothing special at all. Just little musings about ideas that come to me in my day to day life. Nothing interesting.”
“Nothing interesting?”
With his legs crossed, his posture melted into his chair as he tapped the ash of his cigarette into the tray, using it then in his gesticulation as if conducting the orchestra of his speech.
“There’s always something interesting. At least, it’ll always be more interesting than me.”
Aimé’s smile upon saying that shone onto her lips as well. Only, he saw a deeper crack forming on her countenance, giving him a glimpse of a pity in her as deep as his own suffocating sorrow. Without even knowing him, she managed to perceive his most painful wound, piercing and dissolving him with a single gaze. Seeing but a broken image of himself in her oceanic vastness, he crumbled to pieces with the waves of her every expression.
When she looked back up at him with her great blue eyes, he noticed how intense his gaze was in comparison to hers, taking a drag of his cigarette while looking at the café scenery to his side. Again, that irrational anger sparked within him, threatening to engulf and dissolve every corner of himself. No matter how hard he tried, it was nearly impossible to read her heart, which only made a mix of his curiosity, sensitivity and powerlessness grow into something monstrous.
“Now that can’t be true at all; you’re a writer! You most certainly have an interesting life. And from what I read of you, I know that you traveled around, describing the sceneries you submerged yourself in the way painters paint them. They’re all very pleasant to read.”
An almost guttural sigh crawled out of his mouth as he exhaled smoke, unable to hide his frustrations for so long. Something in the texture of her words made them feel as empty as the smoke he breathed. Their mask-like stiffness and superficiality starved the rich depth he craved and still saw in her. Only, in seeing her subterranean heart, he was even more enraged by how she silenced its voice by only voicing the obvious, the publicly understood, knowing with an almost religious faith that she was capable of more. Questioning if he should open up or remain as closed as her, he fixed his posture and took a last puff of the cigarette before crushing it like a bug.
“They sure are,” Aimé whispered with a low voice as he drank from his coffee whose coldness accentuated its bitter notes.
When he looked up at her, he was surprised by the fawn-like fear in her eyes.
“What was that?”
Her glassy, timid tone struck him like lightning. He could only hear the tone of a child who misbehaved and was afraid of being caught coming from her lips. The thought of that blossomed from her fragile voice which always seemed to betray the masquerade of words she orchestrated until now. Her soul, for a moment, emerged to the surface with that simple question. But that only revealed to him the strings tethered to everything in his environment, ensnaring him and threatening to pull him to pieces.
“Nothing.”
As if possessed by the numerous fires rushing throughout him, he suddenly got up, giving him a glimpse of her true colors in all the shades of her unease.
“Excuse me, I’ll be right back.”
Without looking at her, he walked beside her and away to the bathroom as she stared blankly at the empty seat in front of her. Only in his absence did she see that she had given him but a silhouette of herself, an emptiness that merely shone a light on the emptiness she knew the deepest depths of.
A kaleidoscope of thoughts emerged, thoughts he couldn’t separate between memories or dreams. The walls of the toilet stall seemed to grow closer and closer the more thoughts he let rampage in his mind. When he was done, the thoughts coagulated into an idea, one that froze him with fear. Silence swallowed everything as it grew larger, louder, spreading its roots throughout his flesh.
As it grew, he felt it taking hold of his mind, his body, tearing every part of them from one another until only its untamable fire conquered all of him. Unable to contain its titanic effervescence, he struck his fists against the minty green tiles of the walls, imitating the violence of the idea growing within him. But no matter how hard he struck them, how well he released the deafening scream in his psyche, it continued to grow and rend him apart until the tiles cracked and his knuckles cried bloody tears. When it reached its fullness, he was already torn to pieces.
In the cracks of her mask, he finally saw the truth she buried which now blossomed into a sickening reality. While he dabbed his knuckles with tissues, he recalled a memory with vivid clarity, transporting him into a part of the past he could finally access. In the memory, just like in the bathroom, was a mirror that showed his full body. Time folded into itself in both mirrors, showing Zoé lean in to kiss his bloody knuckles, staining her lips a deep red.
That sublime intimacy he always felt now had a proper ground to exist as a truth instead of a mere fantasy. In light of his new knowledge, he could only feel a deeper pain from her masquerade. A radically profound pain that went beyond survival and hunted fulfillment down into annihilation.
Red and purple blossoms stained his knuckles. He studied them one last time, wondering if all the time spent with her was out of genuine care or for empirical data. When he left the bathroom, he noticed her stiff, hunched over shoulders. He purposefully traces his hand over her shoulder, summoning her gaze towards him in a heartbeat with that fawn-like fear again.
When he sat in front of her, he took the first opportunity he could to reach for her hand which rested beside her cup, interlacing his fingers with hers. As he expected, her first instincts compelled her to lean into the embrace. Her fear-tinged eyes nearly shattered like glass once she noticed the scars on his knuckles she partially covered with her fingers.
“Who are you?”
When her eyes ran back to his face, he could see how he nearly summoned a sea of tears. The silence that followed in the wake of her mute panic threatened to rip him to pieces by the second. In the end of it all, there was a sense that she never meant him any harm, that the only harm that really was was from no one else but himself. Even that idea retaliated, giving him a sense that perhaps he was her puppet all along. Aimé lost track of who or what to believe, painfully aware that he couldn’t find it in the abyss of himself.
That weak but profound smile appeared on her lips again, thawing her guilt into something sparkling with an honesty he feared to confront.
“I am… Maëlys, Maëlys Zoé Camuset. I have been your psychotherapist for many years now, and I have been your lover for many years too. And this is… Our anniversary.”
He was barely able to feel his hand as his whole body slowly dissolved out of existence, becoming a spec of perception floating in space. In her eyes, he saw a kaleidoscope of universes, with each droplet in that ocean reflecting all the different parts of him that died in his memories. Every silhouette of his previous incarnations swirled in her cosmos, sinking him further into her oceanic depths until he was nothing but the shadow of a shadow.
“I should have been more honest with you, but…”
“But what?” Aimé quickly added, his voice low and his tone sharp.
“It would only make things more complicated. To have the thrill of a first date going so well and feeling so right is a feeling so many people wish they could have again, and I’m sorry to have ruined that for you.”
His gaze grew intense, piercing her skull with dark intensity.
“You know,” he started, “that it doesn’t matter, right? That I will always forget and always have these new experiences which are always stained with older ones because a part of my mind is still dyed with the past somehow. I will always forget, I will always suffer, and my life will never, never be easier for as long as I live.”
“I just… wanted to make you happy.”
His eyes remained affixed to her countenance, traveling across its every corner as if taking in a nostalgic scenery. He gave his scorched nerves a chance to breathe as he appreciated how she embraced and let shine every color of himself. But deep down, he could never see any of them as his own, for they always presented themselves as things he can only see from a distance. In all the goodness of her intent, it only allowed him to see that he was the insatiable void between connections.
“You of all people should know that I can never find happiness.”
“And I of all people know that you do.”
Without thinking about it, he leaned back. It was then that he realized that her hand was still interlaced with his, her thumb giving his index finger long, slow caresses.
“You find your own happiness in little ways; in living in the present to the fullest, even if they are layered with hazy memories. You manage to let those memories enrich your present, your life, and you have a wonderful talent for transfiguring the struggle through your personality and your art. No matter how many times your memories fade or how many times you feel like you lose yourself, I always see you for who you really are, a you that doesn’t fade and only grows. I see you, and I love you.”
In all his years of writing, it was the first time that he saw a person’s heart radiating so resplendently with words from such depths. Through her eyes, he saw how his radical freedom, at the cost of a cyclical death and rebirth, became threatened by the bonds of intimacy. The one source of groundedness was but another chain for him as a prisoner of forgetfulness and impermanence. Being imprisoned by boundless freedom was enough for him to live, and for that to be taken away would be the cruelest nightmare he could ever fathom.
While her thumb’s caress pulled him in like an ocean’s ebbing tide, that frenzied core of him began to burst once again, reaching out for salvation. In all the parts he adored her, he felt inadequate to carry the weight of her heart, as he was utterly crushed by his own. As he tried to pull away, he could only be pulled towards her as she leveled him with a tenderness twinkling in her oceanic gaze.
“I will never leave, so please…”
The rattling of chains began to sound more like the flap of a wing.
“Stay.”
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