Beginnings

I remember your faces.

I wake before dawn in the briny air. The sky is in transition from black to indigo, a crescent moon still up, the water glassy in the stillness. I hear from the next bay south the whizz of a small fishing boat; trickling down from a nearby terrace one of the European languages, every syllable decipherable in the quiet but meaningless. It’s high summer, the night is warm. An empty bottle rolls from one side of the deck to the other as I collect my things. I leave you still asleep. Seeing your head resting on a garish swan float makes me smile.

-

We go to the beach on a 34-degree day, but neither of us wants to be the first to take our clothes off, so we sit, we sweat, my hands still sticky from the ice cream. Around us is a sea of flesh — the beautiful youths, the leathery old men, the chubby-legged toddlers.

-

This time you have overlong, straight eyelashes that remind me of a calf’s. You speak too softly; I keep having to ask you to repeat things. I think about leaving half a dozen times, but I wait until 58 minutes have passed.

-

We walk around the botanical gardens in early winter. It rains and rains. Nothing is open, everything is locked down. We shelter under a fig tree and you say you’re going to make a massaman. I ask you to tell me how it turns out and send me the recipe. Neither of us texts again, both of us wonder.

-

I take you to the zoo, and it reminds me of a first date I went on many years ago, when I was young. April is the cruellest month. Last time I couldn’t find the caracals, this time their enclosure is closed for cleaning.

-

We talk about your ailing monstera and a concert you went to four years ago and try to ignore the couple a table down from us locked in a bitter argument and the noise of the traffic and the existential dread. The waiter produces a sagging panna cotta that neither of us ordered.

-

You realise too late that you spent far too long talking about your eczema, and how your skin barrier is compromised, and how goat’s milk is supposed to be a less inflammatory option, and how the brand of goat’s milk you buy goes off way too quickly. It’s a shame; you liked me, I could tell.

-

You order merlot, I order pinot. You aren’t sure which is which. I say you can tell by the colour and push the deeper one towards you. You file that away to impress someone, sometime.

-

We are from the same town but we meet as travellers in a city that is old and full of people. I follow you through the crowd, past the lionesque marble statues, the flea markets, the vagrant cats, the grandeur, the squalor. The smells of drains and night-blooming jasmine and frying garlic wash over us.

-

Your name is not important at this point. You are both old and young, you are no particular age. Driving, cycling, walking, you find your way to me every time so we can fail to impress again. Once you were limping and I was sorry we couldn’t find a seat. I remember it perfectly: we were in a sunny courtyard in Seville, a temple in Japan — the moss, the moted air — that festival with the dancers on stilts, the dive bar in the city I grew up in with the broken couch and the vinegary wine.

You were an almost-qualified physio and a photography lecturer and an electrical engineer and a social worker and a supplement vendor and a cinematographer. You were vegan, but now I remember you are not and you order the ragout. I order a second negroni. You toss your shoulder-length hair out of your eyes and squint into the sun as your shaved head scratches against my rain-soaked umbrella. I shiver in the summer heat. You introduce yourself and before I know your name I remember that you hate coriander. Your new smile doesn’t fool me; you walked with me by the Seine and then by the Thu Bon and it didn’t work out. We were hung-over kids in the uni cafeteria and now we don’t remember anything we learned, and I wonder how you are, and I wonder how you were. You give with one hand and take with the other, beckon as you wave goodbye, as you are borne away on a colourful swan float.

I see you coming now and I don’t know your face.