We’ll Always Have Paris
Up close she didn’t look like the woman I loved in
West Germany. Maybe it was because 15 years had gone by. Maybe it was because the
cancer ravaged her body. She was extraordinarily thin lying in that casket. And
she was already a thin woman before her illness took hold.
I remember feeling uneasy around her family,
especially her husband. They kept staring at me like I was a ghost from a dark
period. Perhaps I was. The dark period when she divorced her first husband for
kicking her so hard it resulted in a miscarriage.
Then I came into her life. We were two shattered pieces
holding onto sanity yet immediately trusted each other to form a relationship.
It provided a semblance of stability in otherwise chaotic lives. I fell love in
with her
I took her to Paris and had a dress made for her. It
was a romantic weekend of dining and
dancing and sightseeing and kissing under the night lights of the Notre Dame.
In my life, I have never duplicated a more joyous occasion.
Before she died she wrote how she regretted leaving
West Germany and not giving our relationship a chance to bloom. She deeply
resented her father persuading her to marry a doctor and start a family before
she became too old. Most of all she declared her love for me.
She went on about how her marriage was loveless and
the man cheated on her with every nurse in the hospital. She had a hard time
forgiving her father, her husband, and herself. Between the lines she wanted
to see me again, to somehow resurrect those days of joyful bliss.
I wrote her back for the first and last time. I had to
convey as delicately as possible that those days were gone and cannot return.
Nor could I see her in the circumstances she was alluding to. It was plain
wrong. My heart sank because her declaration came 15 years too late.
Up close she didn’t look like the woman I once loved.
And for a moment I didn’t notice her dress. It was the same dress I had made
for her in Paris. She declined burial in her US Army uniform. Part of me
felt this was an act of defiance against the family that betrayed her.
But another part of me said this was a public
declaration of her love for me. I tried to hope that our time spent together
wasn’t the only shining moment in her life. She had two beautiful daughters.
She had a long career as a nurse. She healed people. In countless ways, she healed
me.
Twenty years later I still don’t understand what I
witnessed. Yet I think about her often. In the short time we were together she
changed me. I finally realized I was worthy of happiness. Even in the thralls
of post-stress, I managed to find love in the darkest days of the Cold War.
Mark Antony Rossi
Mark Antony Rossi is a poer and playwright who also hosts a literary podcast, StrengthTo Be Human. Some of his credits include The Antigonish Review (Canada), Transnational (Germany) and Grin Theatre (Liverpool, UK)