Monsieur Solitaire

He woke up several hours later. The sun lay on their porcelain skins, poked their eyes to awake them. She was cold next to him. He still held her hand and she was still sleeping on his arm; she was only sleeping. Monsieur Solitaires old suit was stained with a wet red liquid and so was his face; it was cold under the sun next to Rosse-Anne. The sun would warm her, he thought, the sun would blush her cheeks and moisten her lips. Her closed eyes smiled at him from far away, from another place. He lay by her side for another hour or two, tried not to move her. He had watched her every word become nameless remains, and every power that had kept her alive vanish. She was only the shell of the voice behind him, only the touchable. He watched what he had loved die, leaving him with a body he had never known. Rosse-Anne was somewhere else, her mind was free. A dead woman lay wedged between the rocks of Montagne de Solitude and he mourned Rosse-Anne over that woman. Someone else lay smeared beside him, and he held her hand and felt Rosse-Anne. When the town was alive again and the children would come to play on the mountain he still sat there, holding her tight, when their mothers called them down, he still sat there with her. When the sun went down she was still so cold, all cold. With tears in his eyes he left her there, past the houses of the outskirts of Paris he want and he didn’t look back once.

“If you are reading this, which indeed you are, you have seen my face. You were surprised, you had imagined a monster. I look not like a monster. All my life people have told me that it is beauty that is my gift, that with my face I would live a happy life. I have been given no rest, no solitude. Were it not for my face, they said, I would be – and also deserve nothing but being - lonely. I have spent my life searching for something beyond happiness. Something where whatever abilities nature has given me plays no part. The night doesn’t judge. Whoever I was born it stays the same. I fled my beauty for the night. I thought I knew that happiness lay in not using what nature has given you as a benefit since it is not something you have shaped yourself. And along came you. I loved you and I knew I loved you and that I had to love you and that I would always love you. I knew I could never be alone again, loving you and that sooner or later you would know you loved me too. I hope I spared of your love, hope I did what I did in time. I hope you do not love me yet and I hope you never will have to. Nature played a cruel trick on me. It made me desert my happiness, drew me from my loneliness and independence. I wish you feel no guilt, because love makes me feel that way. But really, you are guilty. Now, be expelled from my heart, be freed through my blood, and live on through my death.

To the man they call monsieur Solitaire
I give you my loneliness, my dearest possession."