I got the worst fever of my life right before I left Paris. I think I almost died, but I’m not sure.
Céleste started to get sick first.
We thought she got it when the record company she worked for threw a party event and Céleste had to work there all night. I think it was a Thursday night.
We were sad we couldn’t see each other, and even though she had the next day off she said she would probably be sleeping all day. “You could come over to my apartment if you want, but I’m going to be so tired I will have to sleep.”
“I’d come and nap with you. That sounds nice.”
“Really? You don’t think it would be boring? What if you can’t sleep as much as me?”
“No I think it sounds great, we can spend the whole day in bed. And iff I can’t sleep I can just read a book or watch tv or something and you can sleep next to me.”
“You would really want to do that?”
“Yeah I’d love to?”
“You would rather hang out in bed with me than explore Paris more?”
“Yeah.”
She smiled her gorgeous smile. “Ok, perhaps I can text you when I am coming home and you can meet me here?”
“Okay,” I said.
“But it’s going to be really early, like seven or something. Is that okay?”
“Yeah, that’s okay,” I said.
I got a hostel that night and stayed up late sitting at the Sacre Coeur drinking beer and talking to my brother on the phone. I told him all about this amazing girl I was staying with and how I’d never felt so crazy before in my whole life. I told him I was terrified. I was terrified because I knew I was in love but I also knew that it had to end. I asked him how I could possibly leave. I told him I didn’t know what to do. I told him I was scared. He didn’t know what to tell me.
I went back to the hostel and I set an alarm for seven and went to sleep for three or four hours.
When I woke up I texted Céleste.
You really woke up! So cute!
I’m on my way home now!
Ok, I said, I’ll leave now! Can’t wait to see you!
Moi aussi.
I made it to to her apartment a little bit after her and she was waiting for me with some weed rolled up. We smoked and went straight to sleep for a few hours. We woke up and listened to Curtis Mayfield and fucked and we went back to sleep. Then we woke up and turned on a movie and Céleste fell back asleep on my shoulder and she made the most adorable almost imperctible snorts when she slept. I took videos of her sleeping on my shoulder and snorting. I was so happy to have her sleeping against me.
When she woke up the movie was over and I was reading a really great book called Hill William.
“Yuggghh,” she said. “I’m so warm, I feel a bit crazy.”
She stirred around under the covers and ripped off the hoodie she always liked to wear in bed. It was damp with her sweat.
“I think I’m sick,” she said.
“Noooo, really?”
“I think so, I feel a bit strange and hot.”
“Oh I’m sorry Cece, can I get anything for you?”
She shook her head no.
“Maybe we should go back to sleep?”
She shook her head yes.
We fucked and went back to sleep.
I made us some pasta for dinner and we slept more.
. . .
In the morning Céleste was sure she was sick, she was all flushed and sweating. But she said she didn’t feel that bad, and it didn’t seem to have any effect on her libido. We hardly left her bedroom the whole weekend. I took care of her and she slept and made her little snorting noises on my shoulder.
Even though she was sick it was a great weekend. We’d sleep in and I’d make her coffee and tea during the day and toast with butter and pasta at night and did all the work when we fucked. We fucked slowly and softly and we got our sweat everywhere, we fucked with our hands in each others hair and she put her face in the crook of my neck and I held her hair out of her face so I could see her and she put her hand on my cheek and we put our hands together and held on as tight as we could and she looked in my eyes and held my face when we came.
I could only think about one word.
We’d just had sex and we were laying naked in her bed and playing around. We did eskimo kisses and then pufferfish kisses, and then we tried to do the thing where you suck your cheeks in and make your lips look like a fish mouth and kiss like that but we kept laughing too hard and it didn’t work. I tried to eat her nose and then her mouth and she tried to steal my tongue.
“Give it back,” I said.
“Uhhh uhh.”
“What if I said please?”
She shook her head, “uh uh.”
“Pretty please?”
She shook her head.
So I stole her tongue and we traded.
“There,” I said.
She laughed and pushed her forehead into mine. I put my hand against the side of her face and petted her cheek. Then I just said it. “I think I’m falling in love with you,” I said. “No. I am….I mean, I do…..I mean, I think I love you. I mean, I love you. How do you say it? Je t’aime?”
She nodded.
“Je t’aime,” I said.
She looked at me with that burning look.
“You don’t have to say it if you don’t want to, I know it’s kinda weird to say it so soon. They’re giant little words. I just think we have such a special connection.”
“No, it’s okay. I don’t think it’s weird. I think so too,” she said.
“You think so, too?”
She shook her head yes.
“Je t’aime,” I said.
She started glowing and burning me, turning all bright and red and beautiful like somebody had turned on light a inside her. She looked like she was thinking but she couldn’t help glowing red and burning holes into my eyes. “Moi aussi,” she said.
“You do?”
She nodded a cute fast little nod.
“Really?”
She did it again.
We were both all glowing up red and lighting up the room and smiling so big it looked like our lips had been ripped off.
. . .
The next morning Céleste had swollen glands under her jaw and she made a doctor’s appointment. She would be gone for about an hour.
I decided to go to a boulangerie to get us some things for breakfast while she was at the doctor. We were gone for an hour. She returned with sinus medicine, and I returned with bags of quiches and pain chocolats and escargots, and made us scambled eggs and a big Parisian brunch plate. We ate while we watched a Wes Anderson movie marathon and smoked on the couch.
When we were finished eating, I stood up to put the cutting board away and she said, “I’m so comfy and high and full I think you’re the only thing in the world that could make me get up. Like if you just stay right there and don’t touch me I would have to get up so I can touch you.” I stood in front of her legs where they dangled off the couch and held out my arms out like a pronged magnet and she reached to me. I leaned to grab her and pick her up. “Nooo!” she said, “you have to let me!” She groaned and concentrated and little by little lifted herself up and into my arms.
I held her and she held me and we turned into our own private galaxy where everything was the way it was meant to be. We were a tiny little perfect galaxy in the middle of her apartment. Everything was in perfect proportion and everything fit together in a perfect cosmic design. There was one sun and one moon and one perfect planet and a million perfect stars. There were lots and lots of birds singing and making everything more beautiful. There were bees everywhere and magic was real and and everything was the way it was supposed to be. We held each other and turned into a perfect galaxy. We turned into our own place. And everything was the way it was supposed to be.
. . .
The next week I started to get sick. My nose started to run and my throat started to tickle. I walked around in the rain all over Paris. I went to a rock climbing gym at night and went to the sauna because I thought it would help my throat.
But I got worse and worse. My nose clogged up and I had this horrible cough and I got all pale and clammy. I felt like shit.
Céleste insisted I stay in bed at her place all day and just rest.
I slept for hours after she went to work, and crawled to her cough to smoke pot and then back to her bed to sleep. I woke up in the middle of the afternoon and there way a bunch of texts from Céleste on my phone.
how are you feeling mon coeur?
I hope you’re sleeping
are you ok?
please text me back im really worried about you
I told her I was okay. I’d been asleep for four hours. I took my temperature, and I thought forty one seemed like a big number. My head felt really fuzzy and it was too hard to try to convert it to celcius in my head. I went back to sleep.
“Coucouuuu.” Céleste came in the door and woke me up when she came home from work. “How are you my darling?” She’d starting calling me ‘my dear’ and ‘my darling’ as a joke and I fucking loved it.
“I’m feeling a lot better now,” I said.
“I was really scared earlier, why didn’t you text me back?”
“Oh, I’m sorry, my dear, I was sleeping.”
“It’s, ok was just really worried about you.” She sat on the bed on top of my covers. I grabbed her around her waist and rubbed my face against her chest and she nuzzled her face on the top of my head.
“Are you hungry? Have you eaten anything today?”
I shook my head.
“What the fuck! Really? I really think you should eat something!”
“Okay, I’ll eat something if you’re hungry.”
She made us some pasta with pesto. She made really good pastas with pesto or with cream and tuna or with tomato sauce, but mostly with pesto.
“Do you want to watch a movie mon petit coeur?”
I nodded and laid my head on her stomach and yawned.
She picked a movie.
I fell asleep with my head on her stomach.
In the morning she told me to stay in her bed all day again. So I did. I was all feverish and delirious.
She came home from work just like the night before and we did the same thing.
And she asked me what I would do over the weekend because she had to go home to visit her mother.
I said I didn’t know she had to go to visit her mother that weekend.
And it was almost Christmas, and I’d already missed Thanksgiving, and I didn’t have any money left in my bank account and I was running up my credit cards, and I was tired of walking around in the rain all day waiting to see Céleste.
She said she was sorry but she had to, she’d made the plans weeks ago when she didn’t know I’d still be staying with her. We hadn’t expected to fall in love and never want anything to change.
I said I should just buy a plane ticket and leave.
I needed to go anyway. And I didn’t want to be lonely all weekend without her.
I bought the ticket on my phone. My flight was in two days.
I felt like puking.
Céleste wanted to understand why I had to go.
I said I was out of money and I kind of needed to go anyway and it seemed like the right time.
It wasn’t. It was a horrible mistake is what it was. There never would have been a right time to leave, but there probably couldn’t have been a worse time than that. It was a fever delusion. There was too much blood in my brain or something.
It might have been the worst mistake of my life.
. . .
Two nights later, I met Céleste and her room mate Rémi outside their apartment when they got home from work and we walked to L’Abrevoir to get a drink to say goodbye.
It was horrible. I couldn’t say anything. I just listened to them talk. And bought the drinks.
Then Rémi left and Céleste and I went back to her apartment.
The rest of their night was just like any other from the past month. Except that I was grumpy, and I was annoyed with Céleste. I was trying to find the things I didn’t like about her and focus on them. I made her ambition naivité and her kindness irritating and her love for me smothering in my head. It was horrible. I was grumpy and I was ruining our last night together.
We fucked one last time. I loved her so much. I tried to tell her with my dick. But she stopped in the middle. She was crying. “I don’t know if I can finish,” she said, “I’m just too sad.”
I started crying. “Me too,” I said. We laid down next to eachother and I held her like a spoon against me. And after a second I was back inside her and we had our lips and teeth mashed together and her tears rubbed against mine and made our faces slippery.
She was on her period and I came inside her. It was great. Sex with her was always so great. But it was also really sad. So that it was mostly sad and not as much fun. It was a different kind of sex. The kind where it’s way way more emotional than physical.
She turned on Nathan For You, because I’d shown her Nathan For You and she thought it was really funny. She spooned me.
“I love your back,” she said. “You have a really nice back.” She squeezed me.
“I didn’t know a back could be nice,” I said. Asshole. I fell right asleep in grumpy feverish angst.
I woke up in a panic in the middle of the night, soaked in sweat, with this terrible and overwhelming sense of fear right in the middle of my belly like a knife was stabbing me. I flailed around and reached out for her. Where is she? I found her and pulled her towards me and woke her up by accident. She turned towards me and wrapped her arms around me and moved her head next to mine. “What’s wrong? Are you ok?” she said.
“I realized this is my last chance to hold you.”
We went back to sleep.
When the alarm went off in the morning her face was wet against mine. We kept going back to sleep everytime her next alarm went off like we always did, but I think she just pretended to sleep and kept her eyes closed and cried, because her face stayed wet the whole time.
We drank coffee and ate cookies and cuddled like every morning. Except that every other morning was amazing, and this morning was only sad.
It just felt so wrong to leave, so completely wrong.
I was shaking and I felt like the bees Céleste put in my belly were working themselves up into some kind of fervor. I wanted to puke and cry. And then cry and puke some more. But I packed my bag up and took a deep breath and called an uber.
And then it was outside.
We walked to her entry way. We were both shaking and Céleste had tiny rivers of tears running down her cheeks, her beautiful cheeks that when they were dry were the most perfect pillows in the entire world.
“Je t’aime, je t’aime. I love you,” she said, as we embraced outside her bedroom door, my backpack on the floor beside them.
“You actually said it,” I said. And while I was so excited that she loved me and she didn’t care that it was stupid and crazy and that it would have to hurt and she said it, I also felt fucking horrible. I hugged her as tight as I could in her doorway of her lovely little apartment. It was so fucking horrible. We tried to hold on so tight that time couldn’t move us, we tried to stay in the perfect little paradise we made when we were together where we had our own little private utopia and we got to be our own galaxy. But I had to leave. I had already decided.
The door closed in slow motion, almost frame-by-frame, with Céleste standing there in her blue flannel pajama pants and oversized Michael Jackson t-shirt with tears running down her face and her mouth smiling and her eyes the saddest and most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen. The door closed frame-by-frame, like it was slowly erasing Céleste, each frame slower than the last, her arm on the door, most of her, her legs and her hips, half of her, her lips and her throat, a quarter of her, one of her brown curls and a hand, and then nothing. She was gone.