Dear Thierry, 

I left my shoes by the bed. You know how the floors in our house feel with their stone engravings. I can slip my heels along them. All cold. An offering for you, I imagine. Since I won’t be back anytime soon, now that you’ve moved on. I made the bed too. Pulled the covers over the mattress that we cleaned. I liked the way you used to scrub the sheets outside, moving your hands up and down the washboard. We used to do the laundry together—our shirts, pants, pillow covers, and suits. We’d expose ourselves to the garden and let the grass soak up our forms. Then, in letting them dry, we strung up our vetements for the sun. Afterward, I would follow your shadow to the door. No respite in the summertime, especially not on Elba. What, with your way of saying, “The hot days slow us down,” I wish it could have gone slower. I brought my camera out again and finally developed the photos from our last trip out there. Half are of your whims at Santa Caterina. I always urged you to defile it with me, but I agreed to keeping our church in reverence only. I’m sitting in that chair by the window. The brown and sturdy one by the bed. I’m realizing there’s a lot less in the room than I thought. The sheets are pulled all the way past the pillows—like someone could be lying underneath. And the metal side rails, cold like the floor, make odd shadows on the ground. It’s also silent. I’m used to your simulacrum of a dance lashing the walls. I’m used to the way you placed stones on my back when we visited the sea. You rendered my back a landscape, where my muscles were the valleys and the rocks were the mountains. I followed your back, the cavernous indents of your spine—I could place a lot more there. You took it for yourself. 

The sun is thrashing against the windows now. Your departure has me fixing myself a tomb. I cannot see this paper underneath the blanket of rays. Reminds me of voyance—remember how you taught me that word? Seeking other dimensions was possible. My view was always clouded. I never got a perfect sense. Blurry visions, like some dried-up sunflower compass that points towards the sun, but, losing its way, shrivels and falls. I won’t be back either; there is unfinished business in Rome, and this book won’t get done with your absence distracting me here. Anger does not permit me to miss you so much. You may not return to our room again, but I’ll leave this note here, along with my shoes. 

All the way in the Villa Médicis,

Hervé

Michael Grasso (kind of) speaks French.