The Sun Lets Out A Cry
Feuilleton: All The Men I Loved. Part 1, The One I Loved The Most.
Note: I have decided to write about all the men I have loved, and so I want to start with the one I loved first and, arguably, the most. His name starts with a C, and that’s all I’m going to tell you. In this story he is like the sun.
Am I true? First, I have to ask myself: what is truth? To be true is to be a totality—broken and whole all at once. I feel I am true. I can be true and unchanged at the same time, can’t I? Do the truest things about us change?
We meet here:
January 2009. Milan. Grey. Four espressos, one sandwich in 12 hours. I don’t know him yet. He doesn’t exist within the shores of my consciousness. I wear ripped jeans, a turtleneck, an oversized vintage navy cashmere coat, and high platform ’90s boots. Awfully chic for a teenager. I always forget how well I dressed. First body in the hangar (the show location) is me — 7 a.m. I’m studying biology on an uncomfortable plastic chair. Dorothea arrives at 8 a.m. This is the first time we meet. I think she is ethereal. She thinks I’m wise. We are still friends today. We are the only girls at this men’s fashion show. All the boys trickle in like dew drops now. They smell like pheromones and drugstore deodorant. They have tattoos and ruffled hair. Morning breath on their raspberry lips, and playful tongues linger in the intersection of charming and condescending.
He sees me. I don’t see him. Apparently, we sit across from each other the whole day in an awkward circle on these goddamn uncomfortable plastic chairs. I ask the producer for more food. He sighs and unwillingly places mini pastries on trays at 4 p.m. I go back to my seat, surrounded by boyish charm. We talked, I am told. I still don’t remember. He says he liked that I seemed not to care about him. (Remember this. This is a common theme.) He knows he wants to marry me the moment we meet, I am told years later. We don’t marry. The show starts. We walk down the long metallic runway. The show ends. We walk into the sea of photographers when he pulls me in tight by the waist and fills my mouth with heat in the freezing air that makes our skin contract around our already prominent cheekbones. Unknown to me until this moment, when he reveals himself, as the blood rushes to my face. I feel alive. This is when I fall in love.
My driver is one of countless hectic Italian drivers I’ve had through the years. They have a rude but caring way about them. They want to make sure they get you to your final destination on time — not because they care about your final destination, but because it’s a part of Milanese driver culture to love to hate their job and be impatient with their clients. Out I am, of the swarm of people and flashing lights, out of his arms and into the backseat of a black car with tinted windows, on my way to Malpensa.
This is my youth.
In the airport, I buy Dazed & Confused and French Numéro, and I see his pictures more than once. I devour every detail of his face through the pictures, study his wide-set eyes and his small mouth that felt warm and wet in mine only 76 minutes ago. I don’t have his number. A message lights up on the display of my Samsung slide phone. There he is. Years later, he will tell me about the quest — how he ran backstage after I had disappeared, how he’d found the designer and pointed at my pictures that still hung on a clothing rack and said: “This is the girl I want to marry. I need her number.”
I break up with my much older boyfriend as soon as I land.
