I woke up today and everything was fog. All the clarity, the tropical sun, the warmth : disappeared in a night, it didn’t take much, not even twenty-four hours, not even a significant drop in temperature but I could feel the coldness spreading through my bones, the wetness of winter dripping in my mind drop by drop. My dear, I try to imagine your ochre balcony and the radio playing Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony; I try to remember if I have seen you, however fleetingly, on the streets of Paris; if, two years ago, exhausted and tired at the end of a long trip, while photographing the Louvre, it was you who I’d seen walking in its gardens looking for someone else’s ghost. My dear, I try to remember but nothing comes to mind. I can’t remember the touch of your hands on my skin, the changing tones of your voice during the day, or how you look when not facing a camera. All I can remember, hazily, is your habit of using picked-up playing cards as bookmarks. I woke up today, my dear, and everything was fog.
And yet, can you believe it, in the afternoon at the bank, while still thinking about you, I absent-mindedly picked up a pen and wrote:
It’s as if my heart was growing petals of rose.
Beyond Six Rivers 