la pluie violet

"A kiss in the mouth can become a kiss on the mouth. A hand on a shoulder can become a hand on the hips. A laugh on his lips can become a moan on mine. The moments in between these are often difficult to gauge, difficult to partition and subdivide. Time refuses to be translated into a tangible thing, time without a number or an ordinal assigned to it, is often said to be 'lost.' In a city that always looks better in a memory, time lost can make the night seem eternal and full of stars."

-- The Book of Salt by Monique Truong

---

"I only want to see you, only want to see you in the purple rain."

You were standing on the white ceramic tiles of my bathroom floor, your eyes glancing up at the mirror to see my startled reflection staring back. It had been a year since I last saw you. I have dreamt of this moment a million times -- my favorite was the one where I'd make my grand entrance at the annual New Year's Eve party at Rachelle's place and nobody, not even you, would be able to keep their eyes off of me, entranced by how much I'd changed and how beautiful I'd become -- but I'd never imagined that I'd see you standing in my own house, Narcissus before the bathroom mirror with the same wild tangle of hair and look of self-induced lust, a magnetism that could both attract and repel at once.

I didn't want you to look at me. Not yet. My transformation was incomplete; my hair was still only partially tamed, my body still being whittled down, my face still marked with unhealed incisions. I still looked like the same person we both once knew and both wanted to forget.

Mila, I was waiting to hear you say, but you didn't speak.

Time diffused, and this time we were in the same room again, separated by a pane of glass. I could hear the shower water running, feel the steam scurrying up the glass in wispy tail-like curls. The fog shrouded us -- this way, we could see without seeing, look without looking, watch without watching. I could see the haze of your body's movements, unpeeling the layers one by one until the petals of fabric lay at your feet like the withering of the Beast's enchanted rose. But whose death had come? Were you the Beast, or was I?

Everything was purple all around me. Violets, lavender, irises engulfed the room in a cloud of perfume as you walked under the water and let it drench your skin. The scent of the flowers rooted into your nestle of hair, entwining with the rising steam that climbed higher and higher. I could feel your eyes tracing my movements through the fogged glass as I let the petals unfurl, one by one until I was as bare and vulnerable as I had once allowed myself to be before you. The water drummed across my shoulders like fingertips, trailing down my back in a lazy trickle. Bottles and bottles of fragmented body wash stood aligned on the ceramic tiles, glass soldiers each uniformed in a varying shade of purple. I pressed the cool gel against the heat of bare skin, watched the translucent purple effervesce, bubbling and slipping away like a tumble of ephemeral pearls.

For a moment, you had reeled me in again -- without even saying a word, without even a single touch, you had caught me in your fist like a flopping, gasping fish.

And when I woke up from this dream, I hated you all over again.