December 21, 2021

IMMORTAL

The first time I saw Natalie, I was twenty-two. 

She was standing on the pavement in the rue Jacob, a few meters away from the corner where I would turn into the street of my first mistress. Me dealing with my present woe; she, nursing her own loveloss. She was coming back from a love she couldn’t have, maybe coming back from another reality. Me, I was lost in my own present, wondering what to do, wondering what was permitted now, and Natalie became, by accident, and really for quite some time, the ghost who took care of me. 

There I was, loafing, looking up at the window where I liked to daydream. The light going on and off. My brain searching the past and asking why the only possibility was to love a being (because a woman is always more than just a person), and then lose it.

I was in the new world of love. Maybe we’d call it loss.

The world where I discovered my disability. That I was not the one and only for the one I wanted. 

Most of the time the only thing that drew me away from this street was the rain. Suddenly there was a reign of rain, welling up from my eyes and coming down from the sky at exactly the same moment. Ridiculous. A taxi sped by and I got soaked in the splash. I was now too embarrassed to continue with my stalk. And it was when I turned away into the street that I saw her. Natalie. She was wearing a white dress with a purple flowers, and she had no umbrella. 

She disappeared so fast, I didn’t have time to realize that she was a ghost. 

In any case , my love for my ancient new mistress around the corner was so strong that I continued to share my pain with her. For a few nights we shared the same circle of pain. Only people who know they will never meet love again choose a path like this. This destiny. And our destiny was this street: a stretch between the rue Jacob and the university. We kept thinking, she and I: nobody will ever care about us, about our love, even about our past, but we two will know that it has always been about these few meters. 

A few had nights passed when I began to realize a few things.

First, my love was making my life a path of despair. I would not be able to sustain it much longer. Neither to touch it nor even to forget it. But I was alive, and Natalie was my ghost. I think she herself must have been in so much of the same kind of pain, that somehow my own agony was able to bridge our two worlds. 

That’s when she began to follow me. She wanted to show me that I would survive this unbelievable sorrow. She wanted to show me that my hope was not in any resolution, but in how I make living the loss my own truth.

For a moment, maybe a year, she stayed with me. Taking care of my heart and making sure that I did not kill myself. During this year-time, she explained everything to me. She began to make me fully aware of who she was. It was a time, as you can imagine, when stone walls were beginning to look to me like warm human tissue. I wanted to jump into the water and sink into the abyss.

But someone saved me.

I was alone on the bridge. Looking at the water, wanting to put an end to this stupid lost love scenario. Me wearing men’s clothes, feeling a man’s pain; I, an unsustainable being filled with love for a woman. And suddenly an angel, or maybe it was the wind, blew my hat into the river. I watched my hat get pulled under, despairing in the darkness, and I was filled with thought. 

I thought:  I don’t  want to lose my head, because I still have a body, even if I didn’t have a love, or a dick, or even my woman. (And still my only true love, if I’m honest. ) But I still have my body. So I came back to myself. 

The day after this event, I was walking like a prince when I passed the bookstore on the Seine. 

My head was free. Because my hat had sunk in the water. So I could see where I was going.

And then I saw her again.

She was there, sitting with a book. The Amazon.

I bought the book, and opened it, and all the answers were in it. A revelation. The response to all my pain was in it. The book was a friend, not a lover. Suddenly, I could see myself fully. In this fucking gorgeous girl holding an umbrella when it wasn’t even raining.  

I read every single word of her life, and I understood that I was a lesbian. 

And the life of a lesbian is to cry under windows. To let the light come and go, because in our hearts, we always know that this is the journey. To make our loves immortal. 

Felicia Viti

Felicia Viti lives in Paris, where she is currently working on a novel. Her Prelude was published in l’Imaginaire’s 2021 edition of Nouvelles pensées de l’Amazone by Natalie Barney.