I remember a time once marked, full of messages I never showed you, all filled with “do you remember?”, with closeness, with charm, with laughter, with tangled threads of unspoken feelings.
I often wondered if you knew how much I desired you, you who felt like fate itself, a divine sign. I had sensed it before I even took your hand, yet I had crossed out the idea of seeing you again.
In moments of rage, I burned those letters, powerless against the terms I couldn’t surrender to. Sometimes, in spite of silence, you broke the truce, through your absences that carved into my unease.
I had already forgotten, that surprise was one of your gifts. Like between those two statues, where for the first time, you suddenly appeared to me. Since our last goodbye, my road had carried on, and when I thought you were forever gone, you found your way to me again.
I still wonder if it isn’t a dream of some kind, With your presence forever on my mind, Before I wake up alone in the dark, Searching the silence for a lingering spark.
But since that day, not a morning has gone by Without taking a moment beneath the sky, For it is by your side that I belong, The place where my soul has been all along.
After these years together, oh how time passes, I tell myself as I write. I, who had come to believe love did not exist, an invention sold like any other, in a world whose trend is simply to drift away.
So now it is me asking myself: “Do you remember?” Love evolves; it has its ordinary sides, its worn-out routines, its fatal habits. But the smile you wear at every one of my useless jokes always brings me back to those sunlit beginnings, and draws me in again, lyre in hand, near a forest, a lagoon, or whatever the land may be. As through the storm, the clearing still survives.
We made love at a distance as much as in a bed. We seized our chance to live far from here. Sometimes we say we were happy in our carelessness, when we didn’t know our trials would be woven with a certain pain.
And yet today I realize that after the fateful passage of those magical beginnings, no single day of our everyday life goes on without the other being there, for each of us. Between rain and sunshine, storms and calm, I pause for a moment and remember why.
Because since that first day when I had not even noticed you before, from now on, your absences are the only notes that sound false.