THE MATTER OF THE MUCK

18/03/201625/01/2018 / deuxiemepeau / 5 Comments

The Americans and the British were bent on finding Jim Morrison while the Irish and the Japanese, for some reason, longed to add new kisses to the now ball-less Sphinx lingering over the long decayed body of Wilde, who probably watched down over their stupidity and offered a wicked wand of wit as their rouged up lips found a free side of the concrete to consecrate. Kissing a carcass is much like kissing an ass, you come away from both with a distinct desire to rinse out your mouth immediately.

At one point, somewhere amid the ongoing battle of the trees reclaiming the conquered landscape, I took a turn into the shadows and a darkness fell all around as if a cover had been put on the sun like one drapes a cloth over the cage of a bird mid song and suddenly the silence is stifling. Darkness comes over you in the same way when unannounced. The weight of its dominance takes on a persona as its very essence runs its icy touch along your skin. Under its spell, and there was a spell upon me, I lost all sense of direction, trapped so strikingly between the desire to run towards life and the horrid reality that I was standing upon so much death. I didn’t believe in ghosts, not because I was sure they didn’t exist, but because I’d never thought about them or allowed such superstition to cross my path. But there, in that twist of day and night, amid the moss covered beds of those who had long since reached out their heads and hands to eternal rest, everything was open to suggestion.

I twisted and turned over directions in my mind, the routes I had taken that brought me there, both literally and figuratively. I’d come for the fun, to find the forever flames of the famous, now fruit for roots and worms. I’d come also to escape, to escape the daily drab of life, the 9 to 5, the rush hours, the traffic jams, the gossiping, the nattering, the crowded metros and shoulder shrugs. I’d come to death to escape life and lost my way beneath its shadows. I’d wanted something different and found something terrifying instead, mortality. Under the silence of the surreal, I heard bones rotting, flesh festering, souls scratching, ties breaking, my heart beating and my watch ticking, teasing me with every minute I had wasted seeking diversions from the right roads, the real roads. The track trembled before me. Tombs lay broken and open, dark holes reaching into darker realms that only Dante had dared to dwell on in life and all that watched me were birds; black birds, big black birds, baying, sinister sentinels and not a single dove to drown out the darkness.
I felt my own skin tighten around tensed muscles, pulses pound around veins as if starved for blood, as if my whole body feared its finality, foresaw what would one day become of it, here in this place of buried beds and eternal sleeps where the angel creeps and mourners weep.
Suddenly I heard a child’s voice laughing and I turned and ran towards its distant direction but my feet heeded not my mind and my footing fell upon a broken branch of nature and the break of my ankle echoed through my frustration as I fell while nature itself looked and laughed and length. I fell upon a grave. I fell upon an open grave and I lost sight of the cemetery. I lost sight of the trees fighting the concrete columns. I lost sight of the weeping madonnas. I lost sight of the stone eyes angels and so, as I plunged down, deep down, I closed my eyes and waited to be swallowed by the bowels of the earth.

With a shock, I jumped up, in bed, at home. My bed, my home, not a grave, not the end, not Dante’s inferno. My breath could not find itself in the confusion, still stuck in the dream, in the nightmare disguised as a dream, down in the layers of hell. Eventually, in a sweat, I managed to make it to the bathroom and turned on the tap to wash my face in cold water and drown myself back into the security of reality. I looked in the mirror, it was still me, still my refection, still my face. I looked down to turn off the tap and noticed the dirty water running down the drain. Then I saw my hands; covered in muck, my body; covered in muck, my feet; covered in muck.
What in hell is going on, I asked myself? What was happening, had it all been real, had I actually been to the cemetery somewhere under the cover of night and nonsense? I looked back into the mirror at my reflection and it smiled back at me. My heart stopped. My skin tensed, just like in the dream.

My reflection was smiling but I wasn’t.

I wasn’t anymore.

All Words and Photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

All Photographs taken at Cimetière Père Lachaise, Paris, France

THE WATERS OF TED AND KARLA

10/03/201616/08/2021 / deuxiemepeau / 10 Comments

Every summer for 5 years they made their way to the banks of the water. Even as a child he noticed the stillness under the breath of morning that bayed across the river as if the day and the pair of them had not yet been discovered. And it was true, in part, of them at least. Their youth, their innocence, their view on life was mysterious, like the mist above the water, imagining where it came from, what lay beyond it and where it would one day take them.

Somewhere in the last years, someone built the wooden deck, measured the timber, cut it, laid it, hammered every nail between the lines years had carved into what had once been a tree, attached the metal ladder that slipped down into the waters beneath but clung always to the wood as if too nervous to dive right in. But it was too late.

When he was 9, a year before the deck and the chopped wood and the metal rail that cast strange reflections into the sleeping waters, the stillness of one summer morning had been awakened by a silence more shattering than a scream, as if the world had stopped beating, as if the water had stopped moving, as if life itself had stopped. And it had.

Like every other day in august, they had met on the stoop of her front porch, he in his stripped trunks and brown leather sandals, she wore a blue bathing suit and tiny white pumps like ballerinas on stage. She had to be back early, her mother was making pancakes for breakfast. She promised to keep him one for the following day. She always promised and always came through, except when she promised they’d be friends forever.

They ran, as always, from the stoop, down the lane, past the trees and bushes and the bins and the beaten down cars, past the boats raised up out of the water to dry out.

Karla was 10. She had green eyes and liked sherbet dips and read the Beano instead of Mandy. She had freckles on her arms but not on her face. She had brown hair and her mother said she already looked like Ali MacGraw.

Ted was no Steve McQueen. He had dimples on his cheeks and black curly hair. At 9, his moustache was already the talk of the school which meant they finally stopped joking about his belly. Karla never mentioned his belly, like I said, she promised to bring him pancakes.

When they reached the river bank, they usually jumped in holding hands, breaking the surface, breaking the stillness, waking the silence. But that day Ted was still eating a bagel he’d pulled from the pantry on the way out the door so Karla ran and jumped and hit the water and it splashed and she went under and it settled and the stillness returned as he stood there watching and eating, and the silence mounted as he stood there waiting, and the fog stole the air as she failed to surface and he looked into the water, so still and silent, and he saw his reflection in the water looking back up at him and nothing beneath it but nothing and nothing.

She was gone and all that she was became the light that lit that day and all that she had been washed away in the water and all she had seen rose up to the surface and became a reflection that looked at the sky as it looked down from above but only the heavens saw her reflection in the water, only the heavens looked down as she faded, dissolved beneath the milky mists of morning.

Only the heavens and the boy named Ted with a bagel in his hand and tears in his eyes who once loved a girl who looked like Ali MacGraw.

All words and photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

A CHANGE TO THE PROFILE

19/02/201625/01/2018 / deuxiemepeau / 2 Comments

Xavier never realised how entwined love and loss were.
At 48, he’d been married to Sylvie for 12 years.

Sylvie could run the world while juggling pasta, blindfolded, in stilettos.
They had one child, Bastian.
He was 8 and already in love with little Mathilde, next door.

Husband, father, architect; that was his profile.

It was Sylvie’s birthday in one week.
Mathilde’s mother was going to babysit Bastian.
Xavier was taking his wife to Le Dôme.

Sylvie would have loved it if had the car stopped in time, last night.

He lost his wife and a word from his profile.

All Words and Photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

THEIR SPOT ON THE HILL, 100 WORD STORY

18/02/201616/03/2019 / deuxiemepeau / 7 Comments

The light was losing itself to shadow.
Only a suggestion remained of what had once been.
The seas and the seasons had taken the rest.

He struggled up the hill.
He stood again, after all the years, on their spot,
on the whips of life tenting up through the dead grasses as the ruins watched him.

She’d been 19 when he asked her to marry him there.
She’d worn her mother’s perfume and a smile.

He’d only been 17 but he’d found all he’d ever needed.

Goodbye, he cried into the shadow of the day as he released her ashes.

All Words and Photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

Photograph of Dunure Castle along the South Ayrshire coastline in Scotland.

STRAWBERRY GUM, 100 WORD STORY

17/02/201625/01/2018 / deuxiemepeau / Leave a comment

Michael was 18 and wore yellow trainers.
He had dark curly hair which he hated.
He had his whole life planned out.

Kathy was 17 and was happy to be in his plans.
She wore skirts in winter and pants in summer.
She liked gum, strawberry gum and Michael.

He’d kissed her at Becky’s birthday party, three years ago.
On the back porch.
On the cheek.
She’d blushed.

He was her hero, first.
He wanted to protect her from everything.

But when Michael discovered the army, Kathy broke it off.
She hadn’t realised his plans could make her a widow.

All Words and Photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

THE HEAT TO HEAL THE WORLD

16/02/201614/02/2016 / deuxiemepeau / 2 Comments

A Short Science Fiction Story

The first time it happened she was only 8. It was the middle of Downtime. Everyone else was reenergising in their personal preservation pods. The viewing portals were switched to black-out, concealing the constantly burning light outside. The overhead generators whizzed hypnotically as they blew frosted air through every compartment of the enclosed compound, containing an entire civilisation that hovered next to a burning planet. It was the 1st day of the 6th sighting of the 2 new moons in the year 2615AE. After Earth, she used to think to herself, what a funny expression. Was there also a Before or During Earth too?
The second time it happened, she was in the observation deck of wing 153D in the outer quadrant, alone. She was 16. She had learned all about Before and During Earth by then. Monthly identity and history injections thought her all about it. A tiny needle inserted below the right ear had replaced the need for what planet Earth had called school. Earth had become an unsustainable planet, a drained dot in the universe, once home a race somewhat like her own but less advanced, less aware of their personal effect on the world around them.
When it happened the third time, she was 24 and knew exactly what it meant and this time knew how to fear it. Fear had been a recent injection, one of the few traits from earthbound humans that her own race now injected into their civilisation in order to keep communities in check. Originally, they had irradiated all forms of weakness but it had lead to an uprising without the balance of weak and strong. Without the consideration of what could happen. Therefore certain characteristics, once thought to be essential to removal, had been reintroduced. Shame, guilt and finally fear.

The legend had been hinted at, briefly, in one of the injections, but it was believed to be nothing more than a distant dream; a trait of the human heritage they had yet to shed. It foretold how one day someone would embody the power of their own planet which would in turn reinvigorate life on Earth, a world so destroyed by its own people that, after it had exhausted its own resources, the planet itself had turned on them; the seas reclaimed the land, temperatures fell and ice once again reigned triumphant as it had done in millenniums past. Many of their leaders still believed that one of their own would one day burn with the heat of the sun, a heat which would melt the frozen surface of the planet of their past.

When she was 8, it has been a slight sensation that had awoken her, a tinkling along her right hand and up her arm that had felt alien to her. Temperatures in the sealed compound were kept at a firm minus 32 degrees. Their body temperatures had changed dramatically over the 500 years they had spent adapting to the heat of the sun around which they now lived, surviving inside a secluded floating system that prevented them from ever stepping outside or feeling the pressure of the planet they now called home even though they could never step foot on it. Water had trickled along her skin, a situation she was normally accustomed to, but this time it was not cold water, it was water generated from heat, a word she did not yet know at the time. When she was 16, standing on the deck, looking out into a terrain of volcanic fire and flames, she felt the sensation on her face. Her cheeks suddenly igniting with steam which hit the windows and crystallised with the frosted glass and fell and smashed on the floor by her feet.
At 24, she wasn’t alone when the flames shot from her hands like flared talons that flickered with every single movement of her fingers. They were all gathered in the canteen, queueing up for their daily nutrient injections. Everything was injections; knowledge, skills, nutrients and fear too. Some people cowered, others ran, children screamed but the majority watched in awe as legend became life on front of them. Gradually they fell to the ground and bowed before 24 year old Agatha who now held the light and heat of their fate in her hands.
No injection had ever mentioned the transporter that had been built 300 years earlier, that had been hidden and hushed but motored just in case fate returned. No knowledge giving needle had prepared Agatha for the faces of her family as they held her one final time to say goodbye. No understanding of love readied her for letting go of Paul’s heart so soon after she had found it, cherished it and felt it beating like her own.

At 24, when the seal slammed shut, the engines challenged the very flames of the sun itself, she had barely begun to understand the secluded, cold cradled compound in which she had lived her entire life. She had no idea what air was like, what a breeze felt like when it brushed your skin, how the sun felt, from a distance, when you swan beneath it in warm waters. She had no understanding of the simple beauty a flower could offer or how it felt to walk upon a field of grass. No one was alive anymore who remembered such things. Now all that promise lay in the heat that had taken over her body, a body now worshiped like a god, a body now hurtling to a distant planet once filled with lush mountains, deep valleys and heated homes that housed warmth and life. She had no idea what would happen when she landed on the frozen planet but hoped that the heat now radiating from her heart was enough to ignite a whole new world.

All Words and Drawing by Damien B. Donnelly

THE THINGS THAT LEAVE US COLD, PART 4

11/02/2016 / deuxiemepeau / 5 Comments

If you missed Part 1/2/3, please click on the links below:

https://deuxiemepeau.wordpress.com/2016/02/08/the-things-that-leave-us-cold-part-1/

https://deuxiemepeau.wordpress.com/2016/02/09/the-things-that-leave-us-cold-part-2/

https://deuxiemepeau.wordpress.com/2016/02/10/the-things-that-leave-us-cold-part-3/

The Things That Leave Us Cold

Part 4 of 4(Audio version available to listen to; link at the end of page)

We’d been living together, the monsieur and the boy, for almost 3 months in our apartment when he first witnessed the illusion he’d created for himself of me being this mysterious, aloof, guarded kind of guy disappear beneath a laundrette and a lot of money. The phrase laundering money was never mentioned so literally before and I saw the shock of who I really was hit him, like the balloon falling back down to earth, like the mask had dropped and the man beneath stood revealed in his humble state. Somehow he’d formed this misconception that being a writer meant that I had this air of introverted, introspective, subdued magnificence, that my clumsiness was a charm indicative of my mind being elsewhere, dreaming up characters, scenarios, novels in the planning, when in truth I was just hiding out, settling into shadows, comfortable behind the door instead of walking through one and facing people and their complicated realities. Jesus, you know me, I was happiest sitting in my armchair, in my boxers with a book, although you quickly changed the boxers for fitted briefs, house pants and that ridiculous antique artist’s over-shirt which you thought bestowed me with a certain creative look while I thought it to be the perfect cover for a cadaver in a coffin. And yet I still wear it and the boy always laughs at me when I do as if I’m about to make a study of him for a portrait and I get suddenly defensive, can you believe it? I’m finally defending your choice, your taste, your shirt that I only grew to love grew when you were gone, as if that could somehow bring us closer together. He thinks I bought it for myself. Of course he does, because I told him I did. It was easier telling him that than telling him I wear it because you gave it to me and whenever I wear it I feel like a part of you is wrapped around me. I don’t sleep in it. He likes huggable sleeping positions and I don’t want him to touch you through the shirt. I know, I can hear myself saying it, admitting it to you, of course, not to him, never to him. We are monsieur and boy, sharing a little light on the edge of a life. One of us thinks this is real life while the other is just waiting it out. It’s not all the time, but I still see shadows and wonder, now and then, if they will become you, in time, in hope.

Anyway, back to the boy losing faith in my mystery. The washing machine broke. Saturday afternoon and you know how I like my routine, fresh bread from the bakery on the corner, newspaper, clean the house, do the laundry and head out while it spins to avoid the vibrations. So I went to the laundrette instead, Madame China was setting out her goods on front of her shop and laughed at me which was her way of saying hello. She’s still utterly incapable of speaking french so she just smiles and laughs, well, more like giggles but it still makes me uncomfortable. What do you say to a giggle?
Laundry loaded and left, I headed back to the apartment where the boy was waiting for a promised shopping spree for his birthday. I never have cash on me, these days no one does, its pin this, pin that but for some reason I’d taken out 500 euros the day before thinking it would be easier and fun to shop with cash. I was halfway into the bedroom when I realised, in the rush to grab the dirty clothes for the laundrette, I’d also grabbed my jeans. The jeans I’d worn the day before. The jeans I’d been wearing when I took out the money. The jeans which held my wallet. The jeans which were probably in the last stages of a rinse cycle, in the washing machine, in the laundrette, next to the laughing China woman. And in one single moment, everything changed.
He saw me that day, the real me, a mess of a man on top of a machine, looking more like I was trying to mount it than rid it of money, my money, now laundered money. He saw me and just laughed. I thought he would have panicked, turned and run but he just laughed. He laughed while I cried. The back at the apartment, our old home, his new one, he held me while I sobbed and then he listened while I spoke, broke down, broke it all out, told him everything. Can you believe it? I swear, if the machine hadn’t laundered all my money that day, that ordinary Saturday, I would have stayed, for the rest of my life in the shadows, waiting and wondering. Waiting for you, wondering if you’d ever come back.

But you never could, never would. It’s not possible. So, finally, I find myself here, standing on front of you. Finally back at the last place I left you. We were beautiful, sometimes a mess, sometimes a disaster, it’s true, but we were beautiful all the same. He knows me now. I let him in, can you believe it? I let him into the world I’d kept prisoner in the shadows and strangely, he, the boy, this creature has found a way to let the light in.
I’ll still think of you, I’ll still wear that shirt, sit in your chair, I gave him mine. But I might not think of you all the time.
Well, that’s it, that’s me. I hope you like the roses I brought you. They are white, they are in memory of the light that you once brought to me in a dimly lit bar. I gotta go now, Alex is waiting for me. It feels good to say that. To say that someone is waiting for me now. Alex, that’s his name. He now has a name.

“Au revoir,” he said as he turned and slowly made his way down the sweeping hill and out of the cemetery, feeling a weight lifted off him. Weight, wait, the waiting was over. Death would come for him one day too, just as it came for the others, even those we love and can’t let go of, but for the moment, death would be the one who had to wait because there was still more life to live.

All Words and Photographs of Paris by Damien B. Donnelly

https://soundcloud.com/damien-donnelly-2/the-things-that-leave-us-2

THE THINGS THAT LEAVE US COLD, PART 3

10/02/2016 / deuxiemepeau / 4 Comments

If you missed Part 1 or Part 2 you can click on the links here:

https://deuxiemepeau.wordpress.com/2016/02/08/the-things-that-leave-us-cold-part-1/

https://deuxiemepeau.wordpress.com/2016/02/09/the-things-that-leave-us-cold-part-2/

The Things That Leave Us Cold

Part 3 of 4 (Audio version available to listen to; link at the end of page)

It rained the first night I walked back to our apartment with him, just as it had rained that first night when you persuaded me to take you home, ever the flirt you were. We had our jackets over our heads to keep us dry, do you remember? One of those tropical rainstorms that graces Paris in August, as if to wash away the dust and heat, though it’s always hot rain, of course, not the full relief the stifling city longs for, mourns for. You can almost see the steam rising from the ground as it falls straight down from the sky. Straight, that’s what I told you that night, which you laughed at, as if I was pointing out the most mundane, the most obvious. But it’s true, and still is. The rain here falls straight from the sky, like water from a shower, not to the left or to the right, not at all slanted, it just drops straight down. You can leave the window open and it never comes in.

I’d fumbled nervously with the keys to the gate when we got to my building, the building that became our building, the home that so quickly became our home, the one that adapted to you and your sounds, leaned in, to your customs, your scent which still haunts the air on random days. As I persevered with the key, you came behind me, kissed the back of my neck and gently ran your tongue along my skin as if to soak up the rain that fell from the back of my hair but I knew it was just to test me and perhaps in part to taste me. It worked. You had half my clothes off before we’d even reached my first floor apartment and I scurried with the final lock before the neighbours would hear us, or even worse, come out to find us in such a state of undress and desire. I was not that out, I was not that daring, that provocative, but you managed to bring something out in me, something that had been utterly dormant, a certain appreciation of the unexpected, a fondness for excitement, spontaneity, a carefreeness that was infectious. We made love on the living room floor that first night beneath only the lights of the street lamps and the comfort of our shadows entwined on the wall. Made love, was it that, I said it was that afterwards, actually I think I thanked you for it in some rather embarrassing, teenage way and you joked that I was merely a good shag which you overly pronounced in your heavy french accent which was all the more erotic. There I was, immediately trying to make it all proper and above board, nothing sordid, nothing naughty, ignoring the silly fact that you’d just picked me up in a bar, taken me home to where we’d stripped each other naked and shaken the leaves on the wisteria outside with our sweaty, salty, sensuous explorations of the other.
He didn’t kiss me on the neck when we finally arrived, wet through, to our gate. He didn’t rip my clothes off as we climbed our staircase. He didn’t know that each step I took, I felt more and more guilty, that I was bringing him back here, to our place, to our home and possibly into our bed, or maybe even onto our floor. He didn’t pounce on me when I closed our door, didn’t press his body tightly against mine and steal the breath from my mouth with his own lips because he wasn’t you. He stood by the window instead, looking out across the small garden and over the wall into the empty street, just as I had done for the past year.

He thanked me as I took his wet coat and hung it in the bathroom next to mine and then took a seat on my armchair while I made tea in the kitchen. I didn’t even have the customary coffee in the apartment. You were the coffee drinker, the true Parisian, while I sipped herbal, fruity teas which you referred to as piss, continuously. When I turned the lights on, he noticed the candles and asked if I could light them instead. I shivered again. That was always your preference. Not the silly scented ones, of course, too prissy for you, just simply so you could watch the shadow of the light flickering on the wall and make up scenes, monologues to connect with their movements. When he said he liked to watch the light flickering I closed my eyes and imagined it was you.
Was that cruel? Was that too much, too wrong? To be with someone and imagine he was someone else. I held his hand in a taxi while thinking of someone else from long ago, someone said that to me once, years ago, before you, before us, before the emptiness and I thought it to be so horribly unkind. And yet it had become my truth. I didn’t tell him, of course, I would never, I couldn’t hurt someone in such a way, no. But it was how I felt. I was happy to have someone, to hear someone breathing, other than myself again, within our walls, within all that had become our sanctuary and somewhat angry at the same time that who it was in reality was not who it was in my head.

He had a name, of course, what a stupid statement to make. I don’t really mean it like that, it’s more that I didn’t realise at first that I never used it, never referred to him by his given name. I called him boy, pet, hot stuff when necessary, moody occasionally, but I think that was more me. To use his name would have sounded far too real, far too impolite to you, not like I ever mentioned that to him. I’m not that mindless.
He called me Monsieur, at the start, which turned into a continuing joke, then a nickname and then my name, as if my own given name became lost and I didn’t mind that, not at all. I’d given you everything I had, including my name so it seemed appropriate that I became just a pronoun and nothing more.
And so it went, with the boy and the monsieur, a little story, a little tale unfolding amid all the other daily distractions and, of course, the waiting, well, my waiting.

To be continued…

All Words and Photographs of Paris by Damien B. Donnelly

https://soundcloud.com/damien-donnelly-2/the-things-that-leave-us-1 

THE THINGS THAT LEAVE US COLD, PART 2

09/02/2016 / deuxiemepeau / 2 Comments

If you missed Part 1 you can link on the link here:

https://deuxiemepeau.wordpress.com/2016/02/08/the-things-that-leave-us-cold-part-1/

The Things That Leave Us Cold

Part 2 of 4 (Audio version available to listen to; link at the end of page)

I didn’t go looking for him, if that’s what you’re thinking. It wasn’t like that, well, you know me. I’m not what you’d call the outgoing sort, as I’m sure you remember. It was you who’d found me all those years ago. God, it seems like a lifetime and not just a few years that have whittled away. You’d seen me while standing by the bar with your beer, perusing the evenings prey while I sat, tucked away at the back, blocked in by a group of lively fashionistas, a timid dog feeling older than I should have, trapped and probably terrified.
But you came to save me. You, with those blond curls. You, in that brown sweater. You, with those pale blue eyes. You, with that look, that brazened determination to push your way through the dimly lit bar, the crowded tables and floor filled tote bags. But you were never one to let anything stop you, you never minded being looked at, being seen, being heard. You remember that time on the metro, someone got on and sang a dreadful rendition of La Vie en Rose, the one song that every beggar, talented or not, thinks every tourist wants to hear and they’re probably right but do the rest of us, the ones who were born here or the ones, like me, who came here looking for a new life, need to hear it also, day in, day out? It was the fourth time we’d heard it that day and it was by far the worst attempt so you stood up and sang it, full voice, full force, trying your best to drown out the accompaniment, much to the applause of the tourists on our carriage and to the dismay and utter horror of every frenchman on board.

But that was so you, right there and then, just like it was you back then in that bar, The Open Cafe, mecca to all Parisian men of our persuasion. You, coming towards me, sipping your beer as if nothing stood in your way between you and I, and me, helpless to do anything but be mesmerised by your stare and then, as you came closer, your perfume, but again, it wasn’t the perfume you wore but the scent you oozed all by yourself.
I met him also in Le Marais, of course, where else do gay men go. I wasn’t looking for anyone, like I said. I wasn’t looking for anything lasting at all. I was looking for something that was nothing. Something that was temporary, no, shorter than that, minuscule, momentary, forgetful. It had been so long since anyone had touched me, caressed me, kissed me, that I was almost choking. Like I was becoming a frozen form of what used to be. A body deserted of all tenderness. I know what you’d say, I can hear you staying it, I’m skirting the issue, trying to make something dirty seem more romantic, less sexual, more visceral but acceptable. I know, I haven’t changed at all it would seem. I went looking for sex. Is that better, does that make you happy? Can that make you happy? I can’t even believe I am here telling you all this. I tell you I’ve come back for you and, in the next breath, I seem to be this sex starved old man willing to find whatever he needs under the cover of night.

Okay, anyway, I’m telling you what I’m telling you. He was there. This time he was in the back of the bar, another bar, that other seedier bar, with the staircase that I hadn’t been able to bring myself over to yet and if I’d had anymore to drink I probably wouldn’t have made it up those steps anyway, so it was probably a good thing that he touched my arm just as I took the first step and stopped me from going any further. He started to talk and tell me things about himself, I have no idea what it was at the time. I was thrown. I was touched, literally. His hand had not left my arm since that first touch and I realised that it was all I needed. Not just to be touched, as exciting and arousing as that was, but, more than that, I’d been seen. Someone had seen me. Do you know what I mean? Christ you have no idea what I mean, do you? You were never, not for a single day, never seen, not by me, not by anybody. Everyone saw you, no one could ever miss you or want to. But I wasn’t like that, ever. I was more a reflection at times than an actual living person. Not with you, of course, Jesus, not, never with you. But before you and certainly after you when friends stopped dropping by, at first just to give me space and then later it felt like they’d just forgotten that I existed. We had existed to them and then we stopped existing for them and then afterwards, well afterwards I think they put me into the non existent box too. But suddenly on the verge of finding a moment of nothingness, fast friction in a dark room, someone reached out and took my arm and I couldn’t move, could hardly breath in case it all disappeared too quickly. I wanted to remember the moment for as long as possible so I could recall it again when it had vanished.
I know he was speaking to me because I saw his lips move, lips a touch fuller than yours, eyes a shade of blue darker. He wasn’t blond though, dark hair, slightly receding which was surprising as he seemed so young. Your height, give or take, slimmer though, not that you were in any way fat, I just mean he was less built, less muscle, less gym I guess, a bit more of a bookworm, not geek but not far from it either. I think I suggested we go upstairs but he wanted to talk, I didn’t want to talk but I didn’t want him to take his hand away from my arm so I let him tell me what he wanted to but the words never sunk in, only the touch, only that tenderness he’d placed on my right arm until eventually I felt it leave me and I shivered, actually shivered. It was august, I’d been back in Paris for over a year, the entire city had taken its usual month long vacation and it was almost midnight and still 30 degrees and that was just outside the bar and yet, when he took his hand off my arm, I shivered. Funny that, the things that leave us cold in the middle of so much heat.

But he didn’t leave me. He came back with a drink, two drinks actually, one for him and one for me and suddenly I heard him speak for the very first time. And I listened and he asked me questions and I found myself replying and, as I spoke, he put his hand on my leg and I shivered again. It’s silly, I know, silly, trivial, tiny. I don’t think in all the time we spoke that first night that he had any idea what it meant when his body connected with mine, how beautiful it felt to be touched once again and how painful that it wasn’t you.

To be continued…

All Words and Photographs of Paris by Damien B. Donnelly

https://soundcloud.com/damien-donnelly-2/the-things-that-leave-us

THE THINGS THAT LEAVE US COLD, PART 1

08/02/2016 / deuxiemepeau / 4 Comments

The Things That Leave Us Cold

Part 1 of 4 (Audio version available to listen to; link at the end of page)

I stood by the open window and watched and waited, surrounded on all sides by the wisteria that clung on as time passed by and forgave nothing. It felt like I was watching the seasons change as the leaves lost their gleam in the sunlight, found their darker shade as the early autumn encroached and finally fell to the ground and withered as winter wound its way onto the deserted street. Our quiet little street with the bench just beyond the gate where I’d watched you, from that same window, smoking outside so you wouldn’t aggravate my asthma, in the rain with a brolly, in the snow with your fur hat, one hand gloved and other taking heat from the cigarette you clasped between your fingers as tightly as I was wrapped around them. Our street which is now graced with a flow of cyclists, can you believe it? Paris, the new city of cyclists, which just gives Parisians, especially Parisian drivers, one more thing to complain about. We cycled together once, do you remember, not here of course, not back in those days. In Nice, I think it was, in a field covered in red poppies, you at the helm with your soft blond curls unravelling in the breeze and me on the back, with that silly beret you forced me to wear, legs akimbo and arms wrapped around your waist, carried away by the strength and charm of your laughter which was endless and the smell of lavender fabric softener from your t-shirt which I nestled my nose into as if there was nothing more pleasant in the world to inhale when, in fact, it was you I was inhaling, nothing more all encompassing than simply the scent of you with my head on your back and the world falling away behind us before we tumbled off the bike and tumbled over each other. You still had grass knotted in your hair when we got back to our hotel that night which, of course, left me embarrassed and you elated as the receptionist nonchalantly pointed it out. And so it was, with the memory of all that had once been so palpable, that I watched and waited, watched and waited, finding a certain hope in the sound of every approaching footstep and then disillusionment in the appearance of every human shadow I realised could not be yours.
And yet I’d known all along, from the very start, the foolishness of my folly, my frivolous foray into the past. But I’d convinced myself that it was fate that lead me back, not regret, not loneliness, not quite the truth I finally realised as the days became weeks before I folded up the months and packed them away with other, niggling, neurotic memorabilia in the closet, in the dark, in the past. It was brave though, at the beginning, going back up that staircase, those old timber steps which wound their way to that silly door with the stupid key I never got the hang of, not like you, in all your practicality, standing amused at all my clumsiness. It was audacious to open that door into what had become a marooned mausoleum in our absence. The years had only clustered cobwebs onto our acquisitions, trophies, treasures. I lifted dust laden sheets off the furniture as if undressing the room, as if I’d find you beneath them with that devilish smile of yours, laughing at my inability to find you like you did so often, all those years ago, when you’d hide in the shower, behind the armchair, beneath the bed, like a child at play at hide and seek. But you were nowhere to be found and yet you were everywhere at the same time. Your imprint was etched into your seat, your footstool, your side of the bed. It was brave, I’m not lying, simultaneously brave and hard and cruel to an ageing man seeking only a scent of what once was and finding only emptiness in three rooms, teasing me with everything we once believed to be all we would ever need in the world.

Then slowly life began to move on, as it does, necessities, chores, rendezvous, routines and somehow I found reasons to come away from the window without even realising, new paths that took me in opposite directions to the past which I had been seductively drawn to. At first I’d walked to Montsouris, that park, along the hill you’d always run up before me, because that was you, always ahead, always on front, always seeing where we were going before we actually got there or, at least, before I got there. You at the top cheering me on while I gasped for air and crawled and I did basically crawl up there, on hand and foot and in that tracksuit you’d bought for me because you knew I’d never have the guts to buy it myself. As usual you knew what suited me more than I did.

But distractions came their way and carried me from those painful apparitions, those streets we’d once claimed as our own, walking hand in hand in a time when nothing seemed to matter apart from the closeness we shared amid your humour and my desire, the intimacy we’d embraced in that back room with its red carpet while we entwined limbs, lust and love beneath the sheets of that bed we finally battered to death and the connection we created until we got so lost in each other that I managed to lose sight of who we once were individually.
Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t that I forgot you entirely, not at all. I’d come back for you, come back to find you, no matter how ridiculous that may sound after so long apart. But somehow it dawned on me that there was a difference between waiting and wishing, and actually living. Losing you had been my greatest waste, perhaps our greatest waste if I can still speak for us both, but I couldn’t let myself waste away anymore while waiting for you too. I hope you can understand that. It was I who’d come back, be it more or less in the shadows, but I wasn’t sure if the light of day would be forgiving to all that had fallen in between us. And yet, even in the bare light of day, your shadow still hung over me, shading me, sheltering me.

And then he came along.