Echo - on hearing Anais' voice

October 07, 2003 7:50 p.m.

With the blanket you left behind, cream-coloured and smothered in Latin, I wrap your presence around me. It is cosy in its nostalgia, and I remember that you are the one person whose physical warmth I can relive in such clarity. I met you in the autumn, a blustery and cold season when I needed all the warmth I could find, and when I think about you it is always in a that golden-orange haze, when the burnt umber leaves at your feet stirred and whispered your name as a chill wind blew through them. You re crisp, tangy apples, the curling smoke of bonfires. The quiet rasp of one silk stocking against another as you slide into the darkened booth next to me, the fluttering of the candle flame as you leaned across the table to begin quoting the poem I finished, our voices thick with passion, tangling together. Your voice slid over me, a vocal caress smooth as the warm, soft satin of your hand on the bare skin of my arm. Your breath blowing against my neck as you sang in my ear, pressed up to me so close that your perfume made my pulse race and my head spin, the nearness of your body coating my skin with tiny pinpricks of fire.

So of course I turned to you, my red mouth burning illicit kisses down the milky white skin of your throat, tracing darkened peaks of flesh with a wine-drenched tongue. Of course I sat quietly for an entire year, waiting for your hands to move across my skin, watching your mouth move as you talked and placing a not-quite chaste kiss on it before leaving your room one night.

Now you exist, like my memory of the kiss, in the flowing swirls of black ink in my old tartan-bound diary with its gold leaf edging. I trace the paper, smudged with tears I spilt once upon a time, and inhale the echo of your perfume.

- Dorothy