She misses him the most during hurricane season, remembering when their toes would meet under blankets and their lips met above the thundering skies, because those were the first and best memories they had, in that tumultuous weather, stopping and pausing to breath and blink.
Then there was every bruise she received that reminded her of all the hickeys, and even every hickey now made her laugh. She grew out of him all of a sudden; she was always there but never really there, always plotting her next departure on Air France. However this is a story, and not a love song- love songs are reserved for things that are yet to come to pass or places that will always exist.
There have been a few eclipses since, mostly when she was listening to cheesy love songs, and finally understood them.
“I still love you and how I could not when we broke up it wasn't bad”
- Well in a manner of speaking- They had to stop speaking in order to reclaim their independence and to learn to dance separately. For so long their arms had reached for the same sweat filled rooms and their hips had grinded together till both their eyes darkened with pleasure and their pulses could be felt through their lips.
She would see his eyes watching her though, and she would avidly seek them out when she was dancing in someone else's arms and it hurt that he didn’t get up to fight for what he claimed to love.
“You quit, just like you quit everything hard in your life”
Last summer, she fell in love and left for France immediately after. She wanted to quit while she was still ahead and on top in the North Pole called Canada but when they were laying together
“You told me that you’d wait forever”
She felt like the Bryan Adams song, summer of ‘69 that he would wait forever, till she was done pausing and could finally stop, like a record. She knew eventually she would be replaced by a CD that stops when you will it to, no matter where you are. Records were slower to stop and pause, and you lose your place and have to start over again.
Tonight it is hurricane season and she is alone and who knows where on earth his toes are treading, but there are no tracks inside her soft Mondrian inspired sheets.
Her toes were dug pretty deep in the rocky sand of Nice and plastered into the cement in Paris. When she broke out cigarettes, she would expect someone to light it, like last summer when she met Julien, oh Julien.
“ Why are you going back to Canada?” he asked all night, placing Marlboro lights carefully between her lips, putting his free hand beside her thigh as he would light it up the cigarette for her. Between sips of beer she explained that indie music was not Indian music and she was not really that interested in the Jungle Book soundtrack. They laughed they sang and touched skin shyly, the moisture of their bodies in the cannicule (summer heat wave) leaving traces on each other.
She had never dared and though the sweat on their upper lips (in the creases underneath their nose) had mingled by the end of the night with the parting kiss, she didn’t go to Montparnasse to continue the party and sleep at his apartment. The love affair was over and she drank the whiskey that bore her long distance lovers name quietly and was dragged home later by her Columbian amigo to a hot bed and a bad hangover the next morning, mostly from how hard her heart was pounding.