TE16 Turkish Delight

Our Best Love Story

16 Walking in a Mirror

I’m assuming tonight that you could stand once more in front of the mirror for me. It’s an image that’s essential for me to follow the tracks of a fresh delusion, a theme I assumed I’d be unable to exhaust so easily, and this adventure that I undertook despite being aware of all its consequences, indispensable, so to speak, for tiny deaths and hushed rites of burial. Each affair is a new sorrow, every passion in some way the same as death, after all. I then imagine the room where you stand in front of the mirror as being in that house on the beach, recollecting once again the sound of the waves upon the shore and the vastness of the sea. I’m haunted then by the shadow of a lost lover on a summer’s evening. Let us imagine, for instance, that the scent of the sea has suffused our skin, and we’ve returned to this house from the beach or a sun-soaked boat trip. All day long we’ve gazed at one another, desired one another only with our eyes, and talked of the stories and people we’ve been forced to experience, and of lovemaking magnified by imagination. We can hear the sound of the waves from behind the curtains, the open window nudging the curtain aside slightly. We prolong our lovemaking as much as possible, I enter you again and again, then we smoke a cigarette or two. Tonight, however, it’s a bit different, tonight you must be filled with the apprehension of the imminent tomorrow, you must appear toyourself partly giddy and partly hopeful. For you’re about to head into the story of a predictable rainstorm, to another lover. You’ll shiver slightly as the loves you leave behind become 43