Piece of cake

© Julie Trémouilhe

He told me to go to Rome. There had been two tickets to Rome in his brain, once. One departure from my country, one from his. But they had stayed there, in the mental unrealised possibility that we could be reunited in Italy. He had never told me about their non-existent reality. He only mentioned them recently. A crumb piling on the uneasy pieces of cake we’ve been talking about for three years now. I guess he didn’t tell me at the time because it would have been another hesitant attempt at a romantic gesture, just another one ending up not living outside his brain. There were so many. Children playing in the back yard, his and ours. Encounters with friends, or family, at the local market, his hand in mine, no shame, no sorrow. One of these talks was about finding a way to curve time, to fold it and meet in the middle of our gap. This space of time that was perhaps the central issue. I say perhaps, trying not to be too naive. Because it felt more like space than time. A huge parcel almost impossible to cross. I say almost, because I was naive enough to think I could, while he had stated that he couldn’t from the beginning. Reaching the other side would mean finding twenty years I hadn’t lived yet. Or asking him to unlive infinite crumbs of memories. Erasing beloved persons, which seemed too cruel. So I searched parallel voids looking for twenty non-existent years. I imagined his look when he’d meet me on his side of the land. I’d speak for hours about how I figured it out, the night trips of agglomerated days. What I couldn’t picture were the inner changes. Two decades don’t just go through you, leaving you untouched, right? I had found many blows hidden on the inside surface of his skin. So I knew. I was unable, however, to grasp the other alterations, who he was before and then, who he could be if he lived in the middle of a folded page. But I never figured it out. I keep going. With the unpredictable newness of days. While two blurred shapes try to navigate an impossible land in the non-existent Rome. Or maybe, they gave up a long time ago. I’ll never know.