Tourist Magazine

"When there is no link between remembrance and the present, when there is no growth and the silence remains as presence, i walk the streets of paris with you"
Andrea Moorhead

"The misery I hold is good sometimes too, for nights, coming into a cold room, sitting down with my coat on."
Killarney Clary

It is still a house swathed in ivy, a white horse on its side turned over in the road, stiffened and blank behind the eyes, fireworks shaped like dragons, a cabin in the snow, wolf prints, droppings, a man under hyacinth, walking towards the camera, the stalks and branches around his face, bound, unbound, lightning in the sky between flurries of rain, a room in a long hallway of rented rooms, a waltz runs through your head, two single beds and a bright red dial-up telephone on the bedside table, a woman, hoping it will ring again, or that it hadn’t sounded at all.

It is still you, in Paris, in a café that glitters with split glass and mirrors and reflects us over and over into the walls, spreading us, branching our arms, paper chained together, you wearing my scarf, something of mine, the way you always liked that sequined dress, the night it hung over the chair in my room and trapped the light from the streetlamp outside through a gap in the curtains, you said you’d like to wear it as a jacket, making me laugh in bed, announcing the history that would not go away.

Incomplete, something caught under stitches, imperfect delicate suture, foreign object, healed over all wrong, we walk in the early morning, the streets so clean and cold, past steam rising from silver central heating pipes in mesh cages down alleyways, shut up shops and half open windows, the thin white curtains crawling out into the air, floating back in, and later pain au chocolat for breakfast, split in two.

It is still you, last spring, when we were in the bookshop and you went looking for The Pianist and i always look in the books under S so we parted but soon after, i saw you, caught you in my eyes through the bookshelves, so serious, your face intent, touching the books, running your hands over their type faced spines, pulling one or two out and leafing the pages or scanning lines printed on back covers, speaking to someone, asking them something, heading back towards me, coming back to me, and i saw you, invisible shapes around you, pronouncing you louder, shouting you in my ears.

It is still you, in Paris, but your chest is not tattooed, you are not labelled sold, you are bare and clean and stainless, you are not so thin as you have become, it is still mostly the sitting down next to you on the same chair, and the pull, in the same room even, how i felt it, the pull, the leaning in, the tide that dragged towards your centre, gathered limbs, and then months of sitting down in chairs afterwards, splintered, moonless, bereft.

Fresh love circles viciously, in the city mostly, where you live now, sleepless prisoners of their own hearts, dazed in taxis, curled on cold windowsills, watching the night, the streets awake, lit up to the sky, hands on tired eyes in unmade beds, staring into mirrors over sinks, plugholes beckoning them down, down.

And now, finding the word that could be enough for touching you, again, after so long, tracing the lines that i knew and those that would have changed, accepting, deleting, remembering. slow days, the shift of the weather and at night, you searching for a book, searching through the endless shelves in the place i live, one yellow lamplight on, wanting to show me, wanting to read aloud to me, with your voice that betrays where you grew up

and me, mute. repeating it, until everything breaks. this is my shelf-life, this is my sell-by date, this is the dust that collects and clots. city. you call out in the middle of winter, full of infinite endings.