(an unfinished diary entry from October 26th)

The tyranny of recollection falls upon me with languid violence. As my life unfolds with such unrestrained abundance, I find myself unequal to the task of writing it. The usual uneventfulness of my days would usually blossom into prose, as familiar aspects of my life came off as a disconcerting revelation of my imagination. I knew what I was describing, it was mine, but now I am faced with the precariousness of my memory. And, once again, frustrating inadequacy of my language which can hardly contain the vibrancy of these days in its narrow architecture of a paragraph. I lay down to suffer and I don’t finish my dinner until I write.

The more intensely I live, the further behind my writing falls. And then my diary becomes an account of not so much of a life of mine, but rather a humiliating pamphlet of my perpetual inability to catch up with it.

In need of a better dictionary. Am faced with the miserable obligation of reducing everything that has occurred to a succession of sentences, which, not so long ago was my only world. It was my only life. But now, it is almost as if this diary is my very much, too – far – off, ill-minded, handicapped child, abandoning whom would be a cruel act of diffidence and murder.

Письменный декаданс. Вы понимаете мое страдание, или смеетесь над ним? Не смешно. Голодно, холодно, и грустно. Терпко. A surfeit of existence. It’s scary, I’m scared to even begin describing it because I physically, let alone textually, cannot contain its natural literarium. This apparatus is far too weak to handle it, although behold of how beautifully my life can unravel in momentary absences of documentation! Poetic devices…how funny.

I went to a party. At least, that is where I left off my last entry. Agh, the voluptuous disorder of memory and its overlap with the painful sediment of experience is making me spiritually nauseous.

The party was hosted in the 16th arrondissement, a bourgeois apartment with proper high ceilings in a predominantly Haussmann architectural area. It started off with my solo act of noctambulism.

It was raining heavily, I suppose, as it always does in Europe. The droplets fell spikily and ludicrously on my weak umbrella. I’ve tested it before, it failed miserably in England, Eastbourne, flew all the way towards the English Channel, as I caught it almost immediately, lazily staying in my palm. And yet, still, I have no other.

I spruced up a little. Black pants with a laced black skirt on top. Put my hair up in a ponytail. I knew to leave a little earlier since it was a housewarming event and I couldn’t come in with empty hands. It would’ve been insolent, and so I walked a couple blocks in search of a presentable bottle of prosecco (which I ended up drinking all by myself later in the night). On my way to the train station I felt simultaneously agitated by my miserably working handicapped umbrella which kept on hitting me in the face with its metal clatter of couplings, and pleasantly excited to see everyone. I was listening to a slowed and reverbed version of Cowboys and Angels which was almost vulgar to listen to under the rain in a black trenchcoat. Although the moment was certainly special. I remember, vividly, giving it all. I gave the rain everything, and in return, besides the beauty which was so primitive it made me almost sick to my stomach, I was offered a gentle reverberation of the drops on my shoulders along with nocturnal perambulations. It is frustratingly difficult to find anything under the falling rain, which desperately wants everything to subdue. I had a hard time finding the entrance to the station, which made me do a couple idiotic round trips around the roundabout. I thought about how foolish I must’ve looked from afar. Never before had I had to cross the exact same pedestrian almost four times. By the time I found the station, Cowboys and Angels was on repeat almost six times. It was time for it to retire. I wonder, if I were to hear this song in public, will I think of this very night of my tireless walking? I felt hungry. I haven’t eaten much that day, since I was very well preoccupied with thoughts about work and the evening. I had one spare hour before I had to leave my place to get there on time and I spent the entirety of it writing in my diary. I’ve decided to feed else-thing, still within myself.

At the station I reminisced about the time I could’ve spent eating instead of writing and succumbing into a reverie, but there was that. I suppose, other things matter. I wrote about how I didn’t want to go and when I did end up going I regretted the pages.

I ended up buying a bag of barbeque chips at the station. It was almost abandoned, hospital-esque kind of white. The white that makes you feel dirty. I was listening to Angel by Massive Attack whilst waiting for my train, which made the entire act of eating station bought chips at night standing alone in a sunken, white, morbid isolation much too sinister. I called myself sketchy and giggled. Eating chips, soaking wet, alone, in a train station, giggling, made the scene even more dubious. I laughed again. I went back and forth like this within myself till I sat down in the train. I let myself indulge in seepy acts with mysel for the sake of playfulness. I let myself entertain a stranger’s suspicion that way, which I don’t mind. It is much too easy to make someone not want to sit next to you in the metro, which makes the game considerably less interesting. It now became a terribly inexpensive sentiment, along with my recent, unfortunate discoveries of our aesthetic and comic poverties. And now fear.

A woman was staring at me in the metro. I threw a couple glances at her, I even smiled, though she didn’t smile back at me. Idiot. I still had my bag of chips. In these moments I feel an almost civic obligation to become a criminal, to provide the subject with the immense satisfaction of having been right about me all along. The extravagance of her attention excited me. I was luxuriating in her eyesight, enjoying the rare privilege of being considered dangerous without having undertaken anything particularly demanding.

I could steal her phone, or break her laptop in half, or commit some other relatively inexpensive atrocity. I imagined the peculiar relief this would afford her. She was right. Of course she was right. There is no good reason for you not to be born white. What an intolerable inconvenience, having one’s prejudices contradicted by reality. I could spare her that.

She would then tell her friends about the incident over coffee, and they would nod with the grave excitement of people whose worst opinions have just acquired empirical support. “Bent your laptop in half? With a bag of chips in her other hand?” I would become a myth. Or a cautionary tale. Perhaps even a recurring anecdote, brought up whenever the conversation suffered from a shortage of interesting material. I would have achieved a modest form of immortality through the destruction of consumer electronics.

Her indecent willingness to concern herself with a stranger’s existence would have resulted in her belongings being folded like a piece of Orbit gum. A satisfactory exchange, I thought. Anyone can inspire aversion. I find it a far more sophisticated undertaking to make someone regret having never spoken to me. But oh well. I was me. She was herself. Neither of us had any legitimate claim to the other’s afternoon.I turned around and took a couple of pictures of the Eiffel Tower behind me. She rolled her eyes. Even my appreciation of French architecture was apparently incriminating.

In another universe, I strangled her and pissed into her bag. In this one, I got off at my station and tried looking for the apartment on Maps.

I arrived right on time. The merriment was flowing across the corners of that beautiful, strange, empty apartment. It had no furniture, not at all, not even a little bit. I was greeted by H, with his posh, Australian politeness and strikingly beautiful face. I saw him once before, on a similar occasion, and simply could not believe how someone could be made to be this beautiful. It almost hurts. I never know how to act around him. Tall, blonde, lean, blue eyed, prince-esque model. It must’ve taken ages of crossbreeding a homosapien with an orchid mantis to achieve such an extraordinary degree of aesthetic sophistication. His beauty is so excessive that it ceases to be an object of desire in any way but rather becomes an object of contemplation. As though he belongs to a particularly rare species whose existence I had previously dismissed as an evolutionary impossibility. I could only hope to think that he was ever ugly, or at least, awkward at the early stages of his life. Although that seems impossible, he is only twenty four, and has his appearance settled so conclusively already. I found myself contemplating the grotesque improbability of his features, the almost insulting precision with which they had been assembled. Nature, usually careless with proportions, had apparently exhausted an entire afternoon on him. As I was standing by the entrance I found myself unable to utter very simple words such as “Thank you for inviting me”. I only said “I brought some wine” and awkwardly walked around the coat rack by the entrance trying to figure out where to put my imbecilic umbrella.

His girlfriend, Z, also greeted me with a tender smile. That kind of smile only extraordinarily beautiful people could portray, as I stood there and could barely endure the mortifying perfection of her face. Necrotic. Petrifying. Beautiful. She gave me a glass of white wine and I stepped inside the living room where I saw a couple familiar faces. T, the one who invited me, was very excited the moment he saw me. Later on that same night I found out that he practices Freudian therapy weekly, and after each session he snorts a line of coke which made me thoroughly enjoy our encounters even more. He has a very unique face, geometrical and sharp, as it descends into his chin in a rectangular motive. From my perspective, as he is unusually tall, he begins to remind me of a high-tech street lamp. His eyes are a very dark shade of brown, almost black. After I learned about his Freudian cocaine-usage, they began looking like a viscous abyss. I was almost afraid of him. The darkness descended into his purple eye sockets, as he looked at me I was reminded of a quote by Nietzsche, “And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

We all sat down on the floor. Z poured some prosecco into my glass which I already emptied. I noticed someone staring at me from across the room. I feigned indifference, though I was very much curious to who could that potentially be.

His name was A. A french artist and an actor. He came dressed in all black, which was a pleasant accompaniment to my attire. He painted his eyelids black, with a thin line underneath the eye which fell into a dot. From afar, it looked like he was crying in ink. Much as I was curious about who and what he is, I was still very much hypnotized by the beautifulness of every attendee of the event. I couldn’t tell whether everyone in Paris is generally beautiful, or if I was involuntarily part of a secret, primarily Australian club of immensely attractive people. A came with a notebook. He sat beside me on the floor and looked at my Maison Margiela ring which had the classic numeric embellishment on it. Number six was underlined because it came from their accessories collection, I suppose that’s how they distinguish their lines.

“What’s your name?” – he asked me.

I responded.

“What’s yours?”

“A”.

“Are you french?”.

His accent was hard to ignore.

“Yes, very much so”.

“Are you an artist, A?”.

“Yes and no. I model. Act. I draw, sometimes. What about you?”.

“I’m a writer. I’m doing my masters degree in creative writing here, in Paris.”

“’Do you like poetry?” – he asked me.

At that moment, he felt very tender. For someone french, especially an artist, let alone a good one, dressed in all black, he was incredibly soft spoken.

“Yes, I do”.

Which was a lie. I cannot stand poetry. I think we have nothing in common with the genre, shortage of words and an overuse of poetic and formulaic devices are the things I tend to avoid in my own writing. The idea of having to face the abundance of both makes me feel nothing else but frustration towards the writing. How could you be this way? How are you understood?

A then showed me a poetry club in the Marais where they host occasional poetry readings in French. I pretended to be interested in the subject and began to regret the fact that I made a momentary love-pact with poetry. As he was excitingly describing to me all the ways in which the club is beautiful, I began reciting one of my oldest, failed attempts at poetry inside my head:

feels like summer and im gently freezing

the trees are arching above me in hyperboles

leaf coins on my blemishless white skirt

47th street, an elongated eventful thing, a thoroughfare

between my house and the mosque

a golden dome has set me free.

a man with a beard is looking into his palms

please tell me, sir

is that belief a coin, or a candy wrapper?

A was still talking. i figured that i was still hungry as a result of which I had developed an almost proprietary attachment to a bowl of houmous resting right in front of me. I returned to it with a slice of bread between the sentences with the mechanical devotion of an animal at a feeding trough. At some point, I realized I had eaten enough to make my continued participation in the conversation seem dishonest. He took out his notebook and proposed we draw.

I drew a female face on a poorly drawn dog. The joke was that I put quite a lot of effort into shading and outlining the face, and almost none into the shape of the dog. If anything, it was more of a comical delusion of what a dog is supposed to look like. He drew a bunch of cubes and other 3D shapes stacked upon one another, which then found their way into a poorly drawn sink. I told him that I like it and was about to mention how it reminds me of early editions of tetris, but the moment I uttered the word ‘reminds me of’ he ended my sentence abruptly saying “please don’t say Picasso”.

I wasn’t going to say that at all.

I then asked him why and he went on to tell me a story of how Picasso raped one of his younger apprentices. It is a wide known fact that the majority of artists are sexually deviant. I wondered whether this was an occupational hazard or simply a prerequisite for admission into the arts. I looked at him a bit longer and realized that he looks a lot like Mac Demarco. I wanted to tell him that too, but Mac Demarco could also potentially be a sexually perverted example, I wouldn’t know. I drank a bit more and conversed with other people.

One of the familiar faces there was L. A gay, Chinese-middle-aged guy from Amsterdam. First time we met he was over-excited about the fact that I was from Kazakhstan, which to me was a pleasant surprise.  After further investigation I found out that he did a round trip around Central Asia last year. He visited places where I’ve never been before, and showed me pictures of him and his boyfriend resting inside a yurt. On a tapchan, which originally is an Uzbek specificity of decorum, though aren’t we all one anyway?

We talked about art and poetry. I told him about my upcoming visit. My ex boyfriend from around six months ago, with whom we’ve been together for a little over a year, is visiting me in Paris. It is an incredibly sticky situation, God knows why I let him, I guess it would be nice to see him again. L laughed in excitement over this conversation. A joined in. He then told us a story about his jealous ex-lover. I couldn’t understand half of the things that he was saying, not sure if it’s because of the accent, or if I wasn’t concentrated enough, but in the moment, when looking at him I imagined what life would be like if we were to be together.

His body, tender and strong, would be my pillow for the night. We would be insufferable together. We would be talking art at each other till the opponent suffocates in terminology. A battle of accents. A battle of knowledge. Our love would be so terribly occupied with our own minds that it would never amount to anything beyond mutual intellectual masturbation. Intellectual exhibitionism. Our affection would manifest itself in increasingly elaborate attempts to correct one another. What is love if not an endless, perpetual desire to make the other feel like an unethical fool for ever falling in love with you? We would grow old disputing the etymology of words neither of us had any practical reason to use. What a luxurious waste of tenderness. I wondered if it was possible to fall in love with the prospect of being constantly contradicted, and if so, was it stemmed from a recently discovered, unbeknownst to me, erotic interest in being understood incorrectly by someone sufficiently articulate.

Meanwhile, he continued describing the misfortunes of his previous relationship.

I kept on eating houmous, scrolling through the pages of his sketchbook that he brought. It almost annoyed me that he brought one and I didn’t. If only he knew what a diary is for me. Everyone stopped what they were doing to come and see a couple pages of his work. He was an artist, and I figured that he was a mere diarist too, as I stumbled on a couple filled out pages with notes of prose in french.

I asked him if he ever considered becoming a writer, he said yes.

I wanted to smear houmous all over his notebook. He then showed me his poetry. It was painfully good. There can only be one poet dressed in all black at the occasion, one of us should die. H joined in to look at his notebook, with sincere amazement that it was almost indecent. Does he know of our stale, diseased world of our artistic occupations? I doubt that he has an illness. At least not in any way that matters. As he looked through these pages with a smile, passing by poorly drawn portraits, crossed out phrases, pages painted black in angst, playful charcoal, pencil testings, erased names, I couldn’t help but imagine his pristine, soft hands getting dirty in the graphite of our disgraceful world. Delighted by things whose ugliness we had long ago learned to appreciate, there he was, witnessing someone with no acquired, or the slightest suspicion of the world around him, encountering the irksomeness of other ways of being beautiful for the very first time. Or so it seemed like it, for me. After looking through it he then asked us what we want to be for halloween. I told him that I’m dressing up as L from an anime called Death Note. He didn’t know who that was, of course. A did, of course. As I scrolled through my phone to find some decent pictures from the anime it felt like I was an obese, insufferable incel chud in a wifebeater who spends all his time on 4chan, or Reddit, trying to appeal to a princess who has never heard of the word chud in the first place. Everything in me felt clumsy and humiliating. Everything I was, the inner colorful extravagancy, suddenly felt like a moral hindrance. I felt dirty and inadequate. Internally ugly. As I held up my phone with pictures of my favorite anime, him exclamating “wow” in his Australian accent, it all piled down into a newborn pain. My outfit began to feel idiotic, my socks fell unevenly from my calves. For the first time I was glad to sit next to an opponent. A nodded towards Zany Universal. He has the same illness. We sat on the floor like two dark matters, beautiful nothingnesses in a lacy, luxurious apartment which couldn’t comprehend us so much that it didn’t bother giving us shadows. We sat there like shadows to ourselves and each other. Two pits in a white, gleaming room. We could swallow it whole, if we wanted to.

H asked me if I wanted to see a magic trick, to which I responded yes, gladly. He then instructed me to think of a card, any card from a regular deck. I thought of six of spades. Not for any mysterious reason, it just so happens to be the only card that I know in English. I don’t know the names of any of the card suits in English, nor can I pair them with numbers. It is the one thing I never bothered to learn. Six of spades is a card I once heard of in a TV show and have decided to keep just in case, for an instance like that one. He asked me why did I go with this card. My heart started racing uncontrollably, like I was put in a math test in a world where I didn’t know what numbers looked like. He kept shuffling the cards and intently staring at me, waiting for an answer. I couldn’t tell him the truth, that I was an exophonic writer who didn’t know the names of card suits in a language he writes in. I shrugged my shoulders and pointed at my Margiela ring, at the outlined number six. He smiled and asked me what my name was.

“Dariya.”

“Could you spell that for me please?”

D-A-R-I-Y-A. With each letter I pronounced he put a card down. By the time I reached the last A he was holding one card in his hand. He then slowly flipped it towards me and asked if it was my card. I saw six of spades. I had to look a bit closer to make sure that it was, in fact, my card, because I didn’t know what six of spades looked like. And it really was. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I was utterly amazed. to be this beautiful, and a skillful magician… preposterous. I then asked him how he learned this fantastic trick, and how he got into magic in the first place. It was the first time we talked. His answer was cynical and abrupt. “Unemployment.”

“But i thought you graduated?

“I did.”

“What was your major?”

“I’m a mechanical engineer”

“Wow, that is amazing. Do you enjoy it?”

“I haven’t gotten the chance to work in my field, even though I graduated on top of my class. I’ve completed a series of prestige-internships, and still I can’t land an actual job in Paris. For some companies I am overqualified, and others just completely dismiss me. Although I am sure that they won’t be able to find another 24 year old with nearly as much experience as I’ve had, or a set of skills. The job market in Paris is incredibly tough.”

“You model, right?”

“Yes, but that was more of a compromise, I needed to get money from somewhere.”

“What do you think of modelling?”

At that point I’ve realized it’s beginning to feel more like an interview and he still knows nothing about me, though I was incredibly curious. I felt hopeless after hearing about his career misfortunes, isn’t he the ideal candidate for everything there is in this world? isn’t he the ideal himself? And if he, or someone like him faces troubles looking for a job, then what will happen to me?

As I was eyeing his astonishing face while we were talking I failed to notice that there was a girl sitting right next to me, wanting to join in the conversation. A nineteen-something year old ginger, curly haired half-german, half-american girl. I thought about how she could easily be someone’s dream girl. I asked her if she’d rather be her mother or a sibling. She responded with sibling, because raising your own self would allude to the idea that you are your own clone, which diminishes the sole point of the question. I’ve realized there was an error in my made-up scenario. H said that he’d much rather be his father. I figured that he was completely oblivious to the accidental contextual error in my question. I asked them why and then it dawned on me that the question itself is actually a fantastic test on one’s relationship with oneself, it reveals the desired dynamic. I’d much rather be my own sibling, but for only one reason. It’s because I never had one. I suppose I also happen to view myself as my own equal, which is a pleasant discovery in contrast with my inundating inner failures.

I asked the ginger girl what she does and is interested in. Fashion marketing. Set design. H gleamed at their newfound shared interest, although quickly enough it has turned into a semi-debate on the subject of whether modeling is a respectable position in the fashion industry. Her arguments began to sound as if she viewed modeling to be the bottom of the barrel of the industry, something humiliating and looked down upon, like sex work, or selling ketamine on the street. She took great pride in her work, as she explained it, being in the technical backdrop of something as complex and beautiful as a fashion show is no mere illyad. Strangely, I felt like I wanted to protect him. I suppose it was a rather misplaced sentiment, considering he was perfectly capable of defending himself against a nineteen year old girl, whose only offence was having an unnecessarily high opinion of her own occupation. I couldn’t quite understand why modelling was supposed to be humiliating. If anything, I thought it was a fairly reasonable way of exploiting one’s genetic advantages, a practice which has been encouraged in almost every other profession since the beginning of human civilization. I wondered whether she’d feel equally offended by a mathematician making money from his intelligence, or a particularly tall man being employed to retrieve objects from high shelves. I suppose the latter would be a rather limited career.

H didn’t seem particularly offended. He was smiling, occasionally nodding at her arguments, and I gradually lost interest in their disagreement. There is only so much one can say about the fashion industry before the conversation begins to resemble an unpaid internship. Besides, I was getting tired of sitting on the floor. My left leg had gone almost completely numb, and I began considering the possibility of permanently losing it to a particularly unremarkable conversation about set design. I changed my position, which made the girl move her glass, which made me apologize, which made her apologize in return. We exchanged an unnecessary number of apologies for an incident that hadn’t occurred.

Z joined us shortly afterwards. She sat beside me, resting her glass on the floor, and asked what we were discussing. I told her something about fashion, which was sufficiently accurate. She had an extraordinarily pleasant way of participating in conversations, and I found myself admiring her face again. It was becoming a rather repetitive occupation of mine. I wondered whether the two of them ever got tired of looking at each other. It must be a terribly distracting arrangement, living with someone whose face could very well constitute an independent source of aesthetic entertainment. I imagined them trying to have a serious argument about household expenses, or the correct way of loading a dishwasher, while being constantly interrupted by the unfortunate beauty of their opponent.

I asked her how they met.

I had been wondering about this since the moment I arrived. Where the hell did these people even meet? Was there some particular region of Australia where the population had undergone an unusually successful process of natural selection? Some obscure coastal town where the inhabitants were all six feet tall and possessed the facial proportions of Renaissance sculptures? I imagined a rather sinister reproductive programme, administered by a committee of Australian geneticists, whose principal concern was the improvement of the human face. The unsuccessful specimens would be sent to Europe, where they could pursue careers in journalism, writing, or other occupations which did not require their appearance to be particularly remarkable.

She told me they met in Melbourne, at a house party. A mutual friend’s birthday. She had been in Australia for a couple of months, H was living there, and neither of them had particularly wanted to attend. An almost offensively ordinary story. I was hoping for something more elaborate, perhaps a dramatic encounter on a beach, or an accident involving a kangaroo. I suppose that would be a rather stereotypical expectation of mine, though Australians themselves seem perfectly content to perpetuate the mythology of their continent as an enormous zoological inconvenience.

Apparently, he approached her first. She couldn’t quite remember what he said, only that they spent most of the evening talking in the kitchen. I looked at him, standing a little behind us, and found it difficult to imagine him approaching anyone with a romantic intention. Not because he seemed particularly shy, although she assured me that he was, but because the very idea of him having to initiate an acquaintance appeared almost redundant. Surely people approached him. Surely the mere fact of his existence was sufficient invitation.

I asked if she had any photographs of them from that evening. She laughed and said no, but began looking through her phone anyway. I had hoped to see a younger version of H, perhaps with an unfortunate haircut, or some other evidence of his having undergone the usual stages of human development. Instead she showed me photographs of herself in Australia, pictures of the coast, a couple of friends whose names I immediately forgot, and an extraordinarily handsome man standing on a beach.

“Who’s that?”

“My ex.”

I looked at the photograph again.

He was very beautiful too.

It was beginning to appear that Z had developed a rather consistent preference for a particular category of men, the sort whose faces make it difficult to believe in the democratic distribution of desirable characteristics. Her former boyfriend was dark-haired, with a strong jaw and a rather melancholy expression. I thought he looked like someone who would be cast as a troubled young aristocrat in a film of questionable historical accuracy. I told her he was handsome. She agreed, which I appreciated. It is always irritating when people pretend to have become entirely indifferent to the physical attractiveness of someone they once loved.

She showed me another photograph. Another ex-boyfriend. Also beautiful, though in an entirely different way. I began to wonder whether she had ever dated an ugly person in her life. It seemed unlikely. I wanted to ask her, but couldn’t think of a sufficiently polite formulation. Have you ever loved someone who was physically unremarkable? Have you ever had to convince yourself that a person’s inner beauty compensated for the unfortunate arrangement of their facial features? I supposed the question would have sounded accusatory, as though I were conducting an investigation into her romantic discrimination.

H was standing directly behind us.

I became aware of this rather late, at which point I no longer knew what to do with my face. I had been looking at photographs of his girlfriend’s former lovers with considerable interest, and had even gone so far as to compliment one of them. It suddenly seemed an inappropriate thing to do in the immediate vicinity of her current boyfriend. I wondered whether he could see the screen from where he was standing. If he could, was I supposed to acknowledge him? Perhaps turn around and say something reassuring, like, don’t worry, you’re much more beautiful? But that would have been even worse. There is something particularly unpleasant about being compared to one’s predecessor, especially when the comparison has been made without one’s consent.

I continued looking at the photographs.

One of the men had apparently been a musician. Another was involved in fashion, although I couldn’t remember in what capacity. I wondered if there was a particular professional preference accompanying her aesthetic one. Perhaps she was attracted exclusively to men whose occupations could be described in three words or fewer. Model. Musician. Mechanical engineer. Although the last one was already considerably longer than the others.

She told me something about her relationship with the musician, which had ended badly. I don’t remember the details. I was too preoccupied with the proximity of H, and with the question of whether it was socially acceptable to keep photographs of one’s ex-boyfriends on one’s phone. I thought it was. It would be rather ridiculous to systematically erase every person one had ever loved, as though the relationship had been a clerical error which could be corrected by deleting a couple of photographs. I have always been suspicious of people who claim to have forgotten their former lovers entirely. It seems either dishonest or indicative of a rather alarming deficiency of memory.

Besides, I found the idea of an ex-boyfriend quite fascinating. Someone who has seen you naked, asleep, sick, eating, crying, someone who knows which side of the bed you prefer, the exact sound of your laughter, the peculiar smell of your pillow, who has possibly held your hair while you vomited, and who can subsequently become a person you are expected not to acknowledge in public. A stranger with an almost indecent amount of personal information. A former employee of your intimate life, dismissed without the possibility of returning his accumulated knowledge.

I wondered whether her ex-boyfriends knew about H. Surely they did. I imagined the particular unpleasantness of discovering that one’s former girlfriend had found someone so extraordinarily beautiful. It would be difficult not to take it personally. Even if one had already recovered from the separation, there would remain the faint humiliation of having been succeeded by someone whose face appeared to have been designed by a committee of particularly ambitious angels.

I asked if she was still in contact with any of them. She said occasionally, though not particularly often. She put her phone away and began telling me more about Australia. She said she missed it sometimes, the beaches, the weather, the general pleasantness of people. I wondered whether everyone who had lived in Australia eventually developed this peculiar nostalgia for it. The country seemed to possess an almost disproportionate quantity of advantages, although I suspected that the constant presence of venomous animals would eventually become tiresome.

I asked whether H missed it too.

“Of course. He grew up there.”

“Why did he move?”

She looked at me, slightly surprised.

“For me.”

I think I said something stupid, like, really? Really? Really?

She laughed. Yes, really.

It was a curious discovery. I knew that they lived together, and that H had only recently moved to Paris, but I hadn’t considered the possibility that the two circumstances were causally related. He had apparently followed her from Australia after she decided to return to France. I asked whether it had been difficult for him. She said yes, especially with work, and that he missed his friends terribly. I remembered our conversation about his unemployment, and suddenly his professional misfortunes seemed considerably less arbitrary.

I wondered what it must feel like to have someone like him move across the world for you. I couldn’t imagine. I could imagine moving for someone, certainly. I’ve considered far more unreasonable things for considerably less convincing men. But being the person someone moves for seemed like an entirely different discipline, one in which I had acquired practically no experience.

I looked at Z.

“That’s very romantic,” I told her.

She smiled.

I asked whether she had ever considered staying in Australia instead. She said she had, but Paris was where she wanted to be. I found it rather pleasant that the decision had been made without any apparent tragedy. She wanted to live in Paris. He wanted to live with her. They moved. An extraordinarily uncomplicated sequence of events, considering the historical tendency of lovers to make themselves miserable over much smaller geographical distances.

I thought about my own ex-boyfriend, who was supposed to visit me in a couple of days. The circumstances of his arrival were considerably less romantic. He wasn’t moving to Paris for me. He was coming for a short visit, after which he would return to his own life, and I to mine. I couldn’t even say with certainty why we had agreed to see each other. Perhaps curiosity. Perhaps a mutual inability to leave the past in possession of its proper tense. I had been trying to understand the decision for several weeks, without arriving at anything particularly convincing.

Z continued talking about their first months in Paris. She mentioned some difficulties finding an apartment, an unpleasant administrative situation, and a couple of arguments which had apparently occurred as a result of the general exhaustion of moving countries. I nodded sympathetically. I knew enough about French administration to consider any relationship which had survived it a considerable achievement.

At some point she said that H had been incredibly patient with her. She was describing an argument they’d had, something about their apartment, I think, when she interrupted herself and looked across the room.

He was talking to someone near the window.

She smiled.

“I love him so much.”

It came out rather suddenly, almost independently of the conversation. She said it as though she had only just remembered, or perhaps discovered, the extent of her own affection. I was surprised by the change in her expression. For a moment she looked almost embarrassed, though I couldn’t understand why. There was nothing embarrassing about loving one’s boyfriend, especially when he happened to be standing a couple of metres away, looking like that.

I wondered whether talking about someone could make you love them more. Or whether love, like certain illnesses, required the occasional verbal confirmation of its continued existence. I thought about how often I had spoken about people I loved, and how the act of describing them sometimes made them appear more desirable than they had been in reality. There is a peculiar danger in possessing an extensive vocabulary. One can accidentally improve a person beyond recognition.

I told her that I thought they made a very beautiful couple. It was a rather unoriginal compliment, but I couldn’t think of anything better. She thanked me, and we continued talking.

Someone came over to ask whether we wanted more wine. I declined. I had already drunk a substantial portion of the prosecco I’d brought, and was beginning to feel pleasantly exhausted. The room had become considerably louder than when I arrived, although I couldn’t tell whether more people had joined us or if everyone had simply become more enthusiastic about speaking. A was still somewhere on the floor, showing someone his notebook. I saw T standing by the kitchen, laughing with a girl I didn’t recognize. I thought about his Freudian therapist, and whether the weekly cocaine ritual had ever been brought up during their sessions. It seemed an important detail to disclose, although perhaps the therapist was already aware of it. I wondered what Freud would have made of cocaine being used as an immediate reward for participating in a treatment based on his own theories. There was something almost touching about the arrangement, a little private ceremony of psychoanalytic gratitude.

I checked the time.

It was getting late. I hadn’t eaten a proper dinner, although the amount of houmous I’d consumed should have been sufficient to sustain me for at least another day.

I stood up and stretched my legs. They had become rather stiff from sitting on the floor for so long. I wondered how much more comfortable the evening would have been if the apartment had contained even a modest quantity of furniture. A couple of chairs, perhaps. A sofa. A small table on which people could place their glasses without constantly risking the accidental destruction of someone’s trousers. I suppose the absence of furniture had made the party more intimate, although I suspected that this intimacy was largely a result of everyone being physically incapable of maintaining a respectable distance from one another.

I went to say goodbye to L. He asked about my ex-boyfriend again, and I promised to tell him how the visit went. I wondered whether I actually would. There is something terribly optimistic about making plans to discuss an event which has not yet occurred, especially when the event involves a former lover. I had no idea what would happen. Perhaps we would have a wonderful time. Perhaps we’d have an argument. Perhaps I’d discover that I’d imagined the entire relationship, and that the person who arrived in Paris was an entirely different man from the one I’d spent so long remembering.

A asked whether I was leaving already. I said yes, and thanked him for showing me his work. I wanted to say something about his poetry, but couldn’t think of anything which wouldn’t sound unnecessarily flattering. I told him to keep drawing. An idiotic thing to say to an artist. As though he had been considering abandoning the occupation altogether, and my encouragement had arrived just in time to prevent a serious professional catastrophe.

I hugged a couple of people. T told me there would be another party soon. I said I’d come. H was standing near the entrance to the living room, talking to someone, and I approached him to say goodbye. I thanked him for the evening and for the magic trick. He smiled, and I thought again about how astonishingly beautiful he was. It was almost irritating that the impression hadn’t diminished after several hours of looking at him. Usually, prolonged exposure to beauty produces a degree of indifference. One becomes accustomed to the proportions of a face, the peculiarities of its expression, the general arrangement of its features. With him, the effect seemed to renew itself every time I looked away.

I wondered whether he knew how to perform any other magic tricks. I should’ve asked him.

Z came over while we were talking. She had been standing on the other side of the room, and approached him without any particular urgency. She slipped her arms around his waist and rested her head against his chest. He immediately embraced her.

It was the first time I saw them hug.

I don’t know why I noticed this so distinctly. They were a couple, after all. Presumably they hugged each other all the time. It was neither a surprising nor a particularly remarkable occurrence. There was no dramatic reunion, no declaration of affection, no apparent reason for the gesture. She simply came up to him and he held her.

I wondered whether our conversation had anything to do with it. Perhaps talking about their relationship had made her want to be close to him. Perhaps she had spent the last couple of minutes thinking about Australia, or his move to Paris, or the rather considerable inconvenience of having someone love you enough to abandon their country. Or perhaps she hadn’t thought about any of those things. Perhaps she just wanted to hug her boyfriend.

I looked at them for a moment.

His arms were around her shoulders. She was smiling at something he said. It was a very ordinary embrace, made almost comically beautiful by the people participating in it. I thought about how they would go to bed together later that night, after everyone had left. They would clean up the glasses, perhaps complain about the mess, brush their teeth, and get into bed. Tomorrow they would wake up in the same apartment, make breakfast, and continue their lives. There was something strangely attractive about the predictability of it. The prospect of having another person remain in your immediate surroundings after the evening has ended, after the guests have left, after there is no longer any particular reason to be interesting.

I felt lonely.

I watched them for another second, then looked away.

Perhaps it was the alcohol. Or the fatigue. Or the fact that I was standing in a room full of people whose lives seemed to be continuing in several directions at once, while mine was temporarily reduced to the necessity of finding my way home. I felt an almost embarrassing desire to have someone accompany me. Not necessarily to my apartment. Just outside, perhaps, to the station, or even down the stairs. Someone who would have a reason to leave at the same time as me.

I didn’t ask anyone.

I said goodbye again, although I’m not sure to whom, and walked towards the entrance. I put on my coat, adjusted my skirt, and checked whether I had my phone. I looked at the apartment one last time. It was still beautiful, still almost entirely empty, still occupied by the same peculiar collection of people who had made the evening so unexpectedly interesting. I thought about how much of their lives I had learned in the course of a couple of hours, and how little of it I would eventually remember. I wondered what they had learned about me. Probably that I was a writer, that I liked anime, and that I was exceptionally fond of houmous.

A perfectly respectable introduction.

I stepped outside and closed the door.

The corridor was quiet. I could still hear the music coming from the apartment, muffled by the walls. I stood there for a moment, trying to remember which direction the stairs were. I felt tired. My feet hurt. I wanted to go home.

I began walking down the corridor when I remembered that I had forgotten my umbrella.

My imbecilic umbrella.

I considered leaving it there. It was a terrible umbrella, and I had spent the entire journey to the party being repeatedly assaulted by its metal frame. Perhaps it deserved to be abandoned. I imagined it remaining in the apartment for several weeks, becoming an increasingly inconvenient object whose ownership nobody could establish. H and Z would eventually have to decide what to do with it. Perhaps they would throw it away. Perhaps it would become the first permanent piece of furniture in their new home.

But it was raining.

I turned around, opened the door again, and went back inside.

It was lying on the floor, exactly where I had left it, looking as useless as ever.

I took it and left.

What a ridiculous thing to have to come back for.