I'm wearing a beret. You see. We stroll along the avenue of Montana sharing a croissant. The pastry's flakes sail to the ground beneath our decorative shoes as we tread along one December morning. Holes in our socks. No one can see those. Nor the holes in our souls. Our hearts are so damn full.
I have six dollars in my pocket. You have a hundred Euros, a thousand Egyptian pounds, and several coins from Cambodia in your Moroccan bag. You are colorful like a peacock while I am muted in black and blue, hair astray beneath beret.
A portrait artist begs to paint us. Old photographers stumble over one another trying to capture our likeness on their 8mm film burned indelible. Wanting us badly to themselves in darkrooms.
While a writer with a typewriter sits on one of the patio tables outside of a Starbucks, oh so bohemian, oh so bloody, he's sitting at his typewriter and bleeding, as us his muse. Is it blood or their passionfruit iced tea that spills from his mouth and fingertips. One can only venture a guess in hindsight. For at the time neither of us would've questioned blood. Our world was awash in it. We lived in spells of a Haitian menstruation. We swallowed red in blackened sealed tombs. We drank each other like airport duty free champagne.
I never carried a wallet in those days. I still don't. I collected my latex from trees in humid plantations gone wild and made a contraception. Cuz we feared the amount of people we'd birth together.
And the way we walked, it was not oblivious to the world, no, it was nothing less than a hyperawareness of every single little thing.
