The great beauty

We spend two days and two nights in Nice, on the third morning we get on a train together and head west toward Cannes and Antibes. The house of his friends lies buried deep in the ashes of the Belle Epoque somewhere along the plummeting coastline, almost entirely protected from the noise and the squalor of this allegedly modern world.

He stands there alone on the balcony later in the evening, a chimerical Gatsby looking for a glimmer of light on the horizon. I'm sometimes overcome by the silence and the vastness of the ocean and the sky, by all this languishing beauty, and when I am I think that nothing really matters except that we will be together.

I can feel the lingering warmth from the daylight on his skin when I touch him, in the dark air a faint smell of lavender, rosemary and salt. When we kiss his lips taste like subdued desperation.