Kissing and Questions in Barcelona and Paris

—07.09.2000—

I’m in France, in Nîmes. I wasn’t going to write anymore after leaving Penzance but, as always, a lot has happened and I’d like to not let it slip away. The thing that’s been on my mind lately is Mira. I met her and her brother in Barcelona a little over a week ago.

Last Saturday night found us sitting on a doorstep in a small deserted square sharing a bottle of wine next to a burbling little fountain. Two enormous trees formed a roof-to-roof canopy from over our heads and speckled the pavement with cast-off leaves and flowers, one of which fell absentmindedly into my glass. It was a beautiful evening. I asked if I might kiss her. With a tone meant to imply duh…, she said, “I’ve been waiting…”

And with that we were off, taking no notice of the eventual others that came to share the square, or of the sniffing dogs at our feet. We existed only for each other, for sharing smiles, for sharing wine, and for sharing kisses. Only much later, when the city cleaning crew arrived for the nightly hosing down of Barcelona’s Old Town, did we finally extract ourselves from the doorway. I invited her up to my hotel, where we spent the night.

She’s so lovely, her shining, black hair draped around her face, her eyes sly but smiling, her whole-body laugh but (yes, but) I wonder if it’s the right thing to do. I fear we might fuck-up our friendship. And yet I couldn’t resist her. Or perhaps I just couldn’t resist.

She means so much to me. I so enjoy the time that we spend together. And yet, when she asked me to make love to her my body wouldn’t have it. Do I really want this, I thought. What am I doing? Indecision. Not being true, or not being able to see what’s in one’s heart, and not being able to talk about it. I fear this is how friendships are destroyed.

—07.10.2000—

Paris. White ceiling, light green walls, deep red carpet and an air of refinement, this is the interior of the hotel room I’ll be in for one night only. Tomorrow I’m off to the low-rent district for two nights and then up to the high-rent Hotel Atlantis, St. Germaine, where Mira and her brother are staying, for four.

After a brief stint on my own in Nîmes, in the South of France—Mira and her brother took a side tour to Italy for a few days—we met again in Paris to stroll hand-in-hand (just Mira and I—not all three of us) through the tree-lined streets, soaking it all (and each other) in. We walked through Luxembourg Garden. I attempted to order crepes from a street vendor.

“Un crepe s’il vous plaît.”

“Avec confiture?”

“Oui!”

“Quelle sorte?”

“Oui!”

After continuing to agree in the affirmative to his jam queries, less enthusiastically, and more quizzically, each time, a little French light went on in my head. “Ah! Avec apricot!”

My French is, at best, amusingly bad, at worst, amusingly embarrassing. Once at a posh French restaurant in San Francisco, the three friends I was with surprised me by conversing with the waiter, and then ordering, in French. When it was my turn to order, I gamely thought I’d give my French a whirl. “Et pour vous, monsieur?” inquired the waiter. My response? “Je m’appelle, baby spinach salad.” There was a beat of silence, then bails of eye-watering laughter. I’d just introduced myself to the waiter as “Baby Spinach Salad.”

Anyway, we had our crepes and were off. We explored the markets and Notre-Dame. We walked along the Seine, stopped to buy a bottle of red wine, and ended up sitting on the steps under the Pont du Neuf bridge in the middle of the Seine above a tiny island called Île de la Cité. There we opened the wine, which was amazing, and had the most fantastic sandwiches (which we assembled on the spot using French parts).

Rain began to come down the way it sometimes does during brief summer downpours. It was cold for June—I was wearing the new leather jacket I had bought the day before. There we were, the three of us, huddled together with our bottle of wine, watching the rain fall on the tiny, beautiful, manicured tip of the Île de la Cité, a tree-lined micro-park on the very spot that Paris was first conceived 2000 years earlier. There we stayed until the rain became heavier and the sheets of water flowing across the bridge, collected by the passageway, ran down the stairwell like a waterfall, and chased us back into the downpour. We ran, giddily, hand-in-hand, back to our hotel.

—08.14.2000—

I’ve been home for two weeks now and everything is strange. I’ve taken a step back in time to the life I had put in a box nine or ten months earlier. I’m back in Mira’s arms after a gap of about a month after seeing her in Spain and in Paris. It was a nice time in both places. Though I keep thinking, “Are we just supposed to be friends? Am I going to fuck this up?”

And yet it was beautiful: the two of us walking through Paris holding hands and kissing on street corners, Mira sitting on the bed at our super-fancy hotel when I got out of the shower—our rooms were next to one another, Mira staring at me across a small, wooden table in the dimly lit, barrel-vaulted cellar of a small bar on the Rue de l’Odeon (I think). What was it called? 11? It was packed. One whole wall was covered in art-deco wood carving. There were old French posters very much like ones you’d see in a restaurant here, though these looked like they’d been put up when they were new and just left there. The whole place was so dim, so tiny, like someone’s basement. At a small wooden counter, crammed into the front of the room they served sangria from a lone glass pitcher that magically refilled itself every few minutes. A drunken French guy was trying to tell me that Montreux was in Canada. Mira must have been holding my hand, smiling. That’s all I remember, her half-closed eyes, her shiny, dark-black hair falling around her beautiful face in waves, as if it were the 1930s, things like that.

Now I spend the nights at her house on the weekends. I wake up around 8:30 or 9:00 and spend the next hour kissing her, trying to convince her that it’s actually 10:30 while she tries, in her half-conscious state, to figure out if I’m bullshitting her, which I always am.

I blend the joy and the questioning together. That makes it difficult to fully relax into a relationship with her. I’ve got to bring it up with her in the next couple of days. Work is starting up again, same as before. I told myself I’d wait a bit until I make a decision on what to do next.

—07.23.2023—

This is difficult to edit and to read. I still feel guilty about getting together with Lia in Penzance a week before getting together with Mira in Barcelona. Or rather I feel guilty about not being open about what I was up to with either of them. But the most challenging thing is recalling the beginning of what was one of the most difficult experiences of my life.

I offer to my young self the following: just talk. Just share your feelings. It’s OK. Even if you don’t quite know what they are, I invite you to say you have some things to share, some things you’d like to explore together, and would that be OK? I recommend doing it sooner rather than later.

Reading of myself engaging in a relationship without those conversations feels disheartening and discouraging. To hold on to a relationship with someone who I cared for so much, who I valued so much, who I loved, while holding so much back feels heartbreaking.

And, for all of the challenges yet to come in this journal, I hope to find the gift. How can all of our experience, even the ones we regret—especially the ones we regret— change us for the better?