A story i wrote when i was 14

23.12.2013 to be accurate. Posting it here for posterity lol. One of the only things ive ever completed. Word for word from my old tumbkr account below:

(it’s set in paris and i dont actually know how a real kiss tastes like i was just assuming but it definitely doesnt taste like some song from Carmen)

the ending is soooo crappy and rushed but yeah

I 1^st met you in the cemetery, of course.

(A slow dance at some birthday in November. We danced to a song neither of us had ever heard before. I don’t know the song even now, and I don’t even know the lyrics: the singer, in English I think, sang like knuckles along piano keys, his words blurred except for the chorus, come on come on come on and it wasn’t like I was listening for the words because I was smelling the lilies inside your collar and the vodka on your breath. Before you I’d spent every party sipping some unknown drink and watching my friends make out with each other. And yes I still did, but with you it was different)

It was a bright, sunny day, the kind of day that kept one warm hand on your (not you your, obviously) back and guided you, malgré toi, to the nearest source of ice-cold water. June; first day of the summer holidays. I was 15 and alone: indeed I’m always alone, but especially in the cemetery.

(I was in a bookstore in July buying my summer reading. There were already almost a dozen books inside the basket I was provided, biographies and comic books and novels and thrillers and Around the World in 80 Days. I was looking through the latest young adult dystopian stories when I felt a jostle on my shoulder blades and I scowled and turned around and you were there, six feet tall in a dark green t-shirt and round black sunglasses. We talked about Harry S. Truman for two hours and in the end I bought my books, 40 of them and half about the Korean War. We went to the film store on the other side of the city and rented three documentaries that were 90% talking and 10% archive film. At 20:00 we were in my living room and kissing and you tasted like Habarena)

I was wearing my 3^rd-favourite top, the one from Mallorca, and my favourite pair of shorts, and I was holding:

• a symphony of flowers of various origins
• Dan Brown’s Inferno, hardcover, 1^st edition, translated from the English to the French by Mark Taylor
• a pen
• beer in an iced tea bottle

(On the 31^st of October, Halloween, we bought expensive tickets to a Russian production of Swan Lake and arrived 50 minutes late, not because of traffic even though there was traffic, but because we hadn’t even gotten off the couch 20 minutes in. We had to be shown in with a torch and 30 legs had to be raised in order to let us pass. I relished in the complaints those rich women made, and their quick gasps of regret when they saw your walking stick.)

The spot in which I usually sat to lean against a stone wall and draw my thoughts was nearest to Rémy Garcia 1946-1994 a loving husband and Elisabeth Ferschin 1998-2013 insane little girl, located in the bottom-left corner of the cemetery from bird’s eye view, but that day I did not go at my usual hour (6am) and if I did not go at my normal hour I would not sit on my normal bench.

(We were sitting on an ant-sized cliff by the river in September, the rush of the current and the screeching of birds the only noise. I was thinking about my parents and I don’t know what you were thinking about, maybe your parents too. I realise now I do not know what became of them.)

I walked the graveyard’s perimeter twice, and then crossed it diagonally in all directions. For an hour I did nothing but search for a comfortable seat amongst the dead and gone.

(One August morning we were in my room. My computer was on my lap, balanced on the tips on my bare knees threatening to fall over, and we were looking at pictures of you on this program that morphed faces into different ages, well, I looked and you listened to my descriptions as I tried to tell you how you looked accurately while trying too hard to be poetic. There was you when you were a small child and you now, and you as a 12-year-old with acne, and you later, when you’re middle-aged and an estate agent somewhere, you much later when you’re old and wrinkles cover your face like roads on a map.)

In the end I was about to find my usual spot again—and that’s when you caught my eye. In reflection, I can’t believe I had never noticed you before. You stood there, dressed in filthy gray. I walked over and gave you my flowers, and I sat down in front of you, and we talked. About philosophy, at first, and then about death, and then about the apocalypse, and then about the Jurassic era, deep, meaningful conversations. I spent a whole entire day there with you, and that’s how it began.

(On a Tuesday a boy at school asked me to smoke a cigarette with him and his friends. At 14:00 during free period we exited the school gates and took the Metro two stops to the east. We leaned against the grimy tiled walls of the station and I took my first drag of smoke. If a person passed by at the right moment, we would look just like a ragtag bunch of black kids, in a gang and/or truanting, laughing about something in the December air. I saw you on the other side of the street: you weren’t exactly conspicuous, with the busy street crowd parting for you subtly like a 2-frame-per-second Red Sea. You didn’t see me, of course.)

You died when you were 4 years old, or at least that’s what it said on the grave: 1997-2001. I went back and looked you up, and it was a car accident, a speeding truck and a blind little boy to whom nobody paid attention to for 4 seconds. I spent so much time with the ghosts in that crumbling little place, and I could just imagine your death. I could see the neon advertisements on the buildings and the stark blue sky, and the moment of impact must’ve been one of those fast things that no-one really notices and then everyone does, a single miscalculation on the biggest clock of all time that at first barely makes a twang but in less than a second has managed to stop the entire order of operations.

(Last week was New Year’s Day, and I was invited to a big school party held by a senior, and I don’t remember much from it except I wore very high heels which were muddy when I stumbled home barefoot at 01:45 on the 2^nd of January. I also remember that I was talking to a boy about types of liquor and Kim Kardashian and stuff we’d seen on the Internet, and then he kissed me and he tasted like nicotine and paprika chips and mint which is what real kisses taste like. He wasn’t at all like you, or how I imagined you to be. I made you up to be a pretentious hipster, like I am, who thought I wasn’t like other girls, like I did, and he is obsessed with How I Met Your Mother.)

I was so lonely, and I’m sorry. I love you, but it’s time to say goodbye. I am sitting in a coffee shop that faces the Montparnasse traffic. You are getting up and saying goodbye, putting on your coat, which is huge and dusty and tweed and 34 years old and you walk outside and wave goodbye while walking across the road and there is a speeding car of whatever colour and whatever make and a splat and a scream and you are gone, just like you have always been.