Le Juge

"You need to find peace. You need to move on from me."--Snippet of my last conversation with Her.

Times when I had peace in my life:

I was nine. A school day off due to snow. I spent the whole afternoon with the neighborhood kids building snow forts and sledding down the hill. Night came early, so by five, all the kids started to trudge home. My house was at the end of the cul de sac, so there was no hurry to get home before dinner. I could take my time. The sodium street lamps flickered on. There was just me under orange lights and the winter darkness, watching the snow fall. In the quiiet, I swear I could hear each snowflake fall, sounding like tiny little bells as they hit the ground.

Junior year of high school. Listening to "Carolyn's Fingers" by the Cocteau Twins as an afternoon spring breeze blew through my bedroom window.

New Years' Day, 2002. Driving up the 5 from Orange County to Sunnyvale on New Year's Day, traffic suddenly halted four hours in. From my car to the horizon, all I could see was a still line of cars and red brake lights on asphalt dividing bare earth and harvested farm land to the east and jagged brown hills to the west. Fog slowly crept down the hills. Winter sunlight, gold and buttery that cast a fine sheen of nostalgia over the California Central Valley, started giving way to clouds and the beginning of a blue dusk. I had Zero 7's "Destiny" on repeat.

November 2004. I was at Her apartment, watching TV while She slept. As soon as I tunrned off the TV, She said in a sleepy tone, "Come here baby. You have no idea how much I love you." Then we held each other listening to each other's breathing slow until we fell asleep.

"She betrayed you and you never understood why. And you kept on loving her."--Valintine Dussaut to the Judge, Trois Couleurs: Rouge