Embittered French Rose

“Adieu, adieu,” she said in the midnight hour; to the wind, the trees, the stars, broken alleyways and missed payphone calls.

Comme il faut; we all go on when the world stops spinning, and we have a chance to sit in our chaise longue and think, really think and watch the leaves blossom, and fall with each changing day.

And right in that moment, we whisper to ourselves, fermer les yeux:

“We are content.”

Earlier that night, the girl with long blond hair made her way down the Champs-Elysées, she walked côte à côte the Seine; the summer air stuck heavy to the nape of her neck.

Leaving the café, with her café au lait still steaming with wisps of blanc, she wished the nearby étranger, “Au Revoir,” and scurried off to the prochaine rue.

She noted the twilight hour and was transported to the belle époque when life was simple, elegant, and beautiful.  The cri de coeur pierced her with such intensity that she stopped for a moment and leaned against the rail to feel the wind, the trees, the stars and broken alleyways and missed payphone calls. She wanted to capture that one moment and sew another patch into her âme essence, paint another picture, breathe life into a dying sigh.  

When she reached the quartier, she watched as smoke cradled in waves from burning cigarettes. When engulfed in flames, she thought to herself.

With a light touch of the shoulder and an “entrez-vous,” she ducked beneath the low wooden beams to squeeze into the sea of people.

Déjà vu called the masse en rapport. Her head swam with a lyrical chord that beat with every string. The floorboards moved with a rouge ambiance, and as if in a masquerade, shadows spun in release to society’s beck and call—a rendezvous of sorts, for the lonely, the moved, the feeling.

As if a party of the fin de siècle, everyone was en suite, the entire world spinning in melodic symphony.

It’s like a coupe de foudre and you are struck, and you can’t move, paralyzed, mesmerized with him, her, that look, that sense of belonging, where you are home.

The espirit de corps swirled together in such beauty that the sway of bodies imprinted silhouettes onto the walls, the floors, the aura of energy itself, that moment captured in joie de vivre, a certain je ne sais quoi.

Who’s to call a faux pas? One’s own gauche, awkwardness defines the raison d’etre, unites us as individuals, living, breathing like a roman-fleuve of great sagas.

As her body pulsed with the blood of people and music coursing through her veins, the source of life’s light, she ran, away, faster, quicker now. Moving alone, among the boulevards, her debutante acted as a transformation from a world so young, new, naïve, where she questioned the very importance of amour-propre: why we can only love others once we love ourselves.

 “Adieu, adieu,” whispered the girl like a billet-doux nearing the end.

“Touché,” sang the midnight sky in the moonlight hour of a shooting star that brushed the black canvas of a film noir.

Encore, Encore. Adieu, c’est la vie.