a bad pain perdu and a decade

the last time i saw Laurent was at a little French bistro in Saigon. i ordered a cocktail, and he wanted to try the pain perdu.

there was something almost unbearably ordinary about it, the two of us sitting there, choosing small things from a menu.

the forty-five minutes conversation was much about things and people that run in parallels:

• big corporations
• his mother
• he was born the same year Chernobyl exploded
• Parisienne at their finest
• someone else's man became a CEO
• long before this, i had once left the same man behind
• Africa
• the Saigonese in me
• death
• doubts;
• skepticism

Laurent took a portrait of me. the pain perdu turned out to be a bad idea. he frowned at it, paused, took a sip from his beer bottle, and then, with perfect calm, said to me:

"i have known you for a decade, and every year you offer the world a different version of yourself. kaleidoscopic, somehow- like the freckles scattered across your face."

i returned to the hotel, got drunk with the staff, slept badly, and by the following evening, i had already disappeared into another city.

things and people that run in parallels:

• my father drank until it killed him and years later, i pour another glass and laugh that bad habits run in the family
• no one ever tells me my destruction is fatal until there is nothing left to save
• all the letters that never found their way to anyone.
• i lived through long years of solitude, trapped in a writer's block that seemed to have no beginning and no intention of ending
• i treated love like a fire alarm and every time it went off, i ran away
• and being reminded, for the rest of my life, that i ran away
• "touch me and you'll never be alone"
• my name leaving your mouth with a bitter aftertaste
• the decade-long relationship that left everyone involved bruised for life