I hope the holidays were really lovely for you, and that you ate lots of good food and got everything you wanted. I personally got a colossal bruise in the shape of Sweden on my back, so I feel I’m entitled to writing less, whining more, sleeping more… but I have to sleep on my stomach. It sucks. I’m gonna have bad dreams. Or an asymmetrical face.

But even though I’m in pain, I have stuff for you, not because I’m a masochist but because I love you. In my last article I gushed about Catherine Deneuve, but it was more a love born of memory than anything else—I seem to fall in and out of love with her every October—and even though my dad’s childhood fondness for her creates a sense of stability in my own, I can’t help what fluctuates. 

I wrote “Les Demoiselles de Rochefort” on the sixth of October, after her sister’s Wikipedia page made me cry. The year Françoise Dorléac died (1967), she starred beside her younger sister in a love-infused, Jacques-Demy-directed, idyllic French-seaside-town musical of the same name. They played twins.

“Les Demoiselles de Rochefort”

My boyfriend isn’t Catherine Deneuve but

Might as well be because no person in the world

Is sadder about the death of Françoise Dorléac

Hands over his naked chest or fluffy blue robed chest or hard flat gut

Same dainty nose same thick blond mane I just

Love him more for it

But it’s all he fucking talks about

I know that the most beautiful and virtuous of men can make bodies of water of their hearts and the shore their frothy pink lips 

So every night I buy him cups of foam from Starbucks

Because he is in too much pain to leave the apartment

His first girlfriend was a curator who left him because he always tasted like blood

She didn’t know the tang was dream

The metal jewel

The rental car on fire

The gamine on stardom’s international borders

I lay with his keening head on my legs on my twenty-fourth birthday and let the masculine voice of ideal desolation vibrate through me

Da, he doesn’t sleep because

She didn’t die on impact

Her director called her Raspberry

Her sister called her fish eyes

She was shy and fey and merciful

In the palm with which she slapped you

But Insect killer! never meant a single physical thing to me until my boyfriend stopped eating 

To make room for idolatry

I didn’t know that she was just a year older than I was and

I didn’t know that pinned under the steering wheel she couldn’t unbuckle her seat belt and

I didn’t know that she felt tortured by her looks and great fear of dying

Until he woke me up in the middle of the night with

Puffy eyes and showed me

His cheque book, diary, and driver’s licence

And with his lighter gently blackened them

And from then on only vaped

If as you look at his face you squint against the bright light of it you will

Think him secretive and cold

But hold your watery eyes open to that glimmering unbelievable Heaven

Give him medication for his pain

Kiss him on the side of his head

Pick up his girlfriend in a caravan on the side of the road

Let her pour hot foamed milk into his singing mouth

Soothe what was unsoothable

And he will be breathing shallowly 

And he will be feeding you hope

And he will be bursting with true love