. | Meridian Allison Alsup In retrospect how we marvel at coincidence and ordain it divine grace; that I should have been an American studying in a French town of no importance and that this traveling symphony should have stopped for an evening and that I should have been persuaded to attend the performance, all seems more than chance. I am sure I was at the time in love with a French boy, the smartest in our forum. He was so impressive with his tightly knotted cravates though I am also sure at that time my feelings remained padlocked beneath a chic sweater bought in the hopes of being mistaken for just another femme fatale minus the cigarette. His ass made the case for men in tight pants. The symphony came from Odessa, but maybe not. Metal folding chairs had been brought in, so commonplace for the Palais de Justice with its vaulted ceilings, kaleidoscopic windows and other architectural details then forgotten but that had once been described by our guide while we collegiates, fresh off the plane, chewed gum, wondered why they called it a French kiss. Perhaps if the boy had already touched my hair as he would later do fingering a cravate denouee in front of his collection of English titles (equally impressive) perhaps then, coincidence would have meant little. But the night of the symphony, in a stone palace where men had been sentenced to die; I slipped into a warm narcosis, an infusion of Russian wistfulness and a passion capable only of those on the cusp of adulthood. Then as if the conductor were a migician, a white bird appeared in the rafters fifty feet above. It glided between the beams on a flight path as sweeping as the trapeze artist. Others emerged: our faces lifted to watch this aerial waltz and I thought Franceis the most beautiful country which is, of course, what all Americans in love think but then every once in a while it's true. For there was once that moment when feelings until then larval, hatched and surfaced, when my senses aligned in harmonic convergence and the air compressed with the smoke of candelabras so that each breath stroked like a swatch of velvet, and my heart inflated as if preparing for an aria. Did the young Mussorgsky stare into the night sky to find his compositions revealed in the patterning of the stars? This moment rises like the brilliant meridian of noon threatening to eclipse all that remains to follow. In its place, a tepid wake, encrusted with mulch; we are left to forever look over our shoulders like school girls who play hopscotch backwards watching for the square that holds the pebble, as if we could ever calculate the return trip, as if we ever saw it coming the first time. |
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-Allison Alsup