Time that refuses to be translated into a tangible thing, time without a number or an ordinal assigned to it, is often said to be “lost.” In a city that always looks better in a memory, time lost can make the night seem eternal and full of stars.

When they are like this, I remember what the man on the bridge had told me: “The French are all right in France.” What he meant, he explained, was that when the French are in the colonies they lose their natural inclination toward fraternity, equality, and liberty. They leave those ideals behind in Mother France, leaving them free to treat us like bastards in the land of our birth.

Such a “match,” even if identified, would only allow me the illusion of communication and you the illusion of understanding. I could claim, for example, that my first memory was the taste of an unripe banana, and many in the world would nod their heads, familiar with this unpleasantness. But we all haven’t tasted the same unripe fruit. In order to feed not so alone in the world, we blur the lines of our subjective memories, and we say to one another, “I know exactly what you mean!

My self-righteous rage burns until I am forced to concede that I, in fact, have told them nothing. This language that I dip into like a dry inkwell has failed me.

Lovers who have lived a lifetime together have the luxury of never having to say anything new.

And so, like a courtesan, forced to perform the dance of the seven veils, I grudgingly reveal the names, one by one, of the cities that have carved their names into me, leaving behind the scar tissue that forms the bulk of who I am.

We loved our opposites so that we could free ourselves from our selves.

Though contrary to what the Old Man would have me believe, the vocabulary of servitude is not built upon my knowledge of foreign words but rather on my ability to swallow them.

He wrote that it would have been better for me to hear it all in person. What he meant was that paper was not strong enough to bear the weight of what he had to say but that he would have to test its strength anyway.

I had forgotten how different my language looks on paper, that its letters have so little resemblance to how they actually sound. Words, most I had not spoken for years, generously gave themselves to me. Fluency, after all, is relative. On that sheet of paper, on another side of the globe, I am fluent.