Enveloped with Hope

As soon as I saw those tiny daisies dotting each loopy I and smelled that cinnamon fragrance of autumn afternoons in a park with her hand in mine, my racing to the laptop to book a flight across the English Channel was as certain as a king’s wax-sealed ordinance. Even after ten long, agonising years of waiting by an ever-empty post box, of tears flowing into each other like spilt ink, the blush pink letter in my hand was enough for me to expedite each step just to see her again.

Margaux Petit, the effervescent pixie who filled my twenties with magic, had written to me. Margaux Petit whose long, blonde waves, oceanic eyes, and champagne laughter have been inscribed in my mind since that afternoon she walked to my library table a decade and a half ago. Margaux Petit who’d concocted for me impromptu gossamer-soft sonnets after every date, who’d sing along to the 70s folk rock songs I played at our shared flat. Margaux Petit who I left behind with practically nary a syllable when I came back to London.

I take out the rosy missive out of my pocket, its paper skin wrinkled by a million trembling moments of rereading. From my taxi’s window, Nantes’ stunning 18th Century terraced houses with their ornate wrought-iron balconies and the sapphire of the Loire must be sparkling in the low late winter sun. However, that glitter is eclipsed in my consciousness by the glint of yearning as I take in Margaux’s words once more.

**

Dearest Luke,

Hello.

Firstly, you should know how strange it feels to write those first three words again. Funny how just three short blends of letters can make me sense an entire whirlpool of language wash away from me. How am I suddenly so incoherent composing a simple note sent across a sea when I’ve woven morphemes into tapestries all my life? I suppose it’s just the way it is. I will always willingly, gleefully let you rob my speech prowess, you know.

How are things with you? Did you get called to the Bar, just as you had scribbled on that seafoam green sticky note you posted on the cupboard door of our room? Is being a barrister as stressful as you’d told me during those coffee-fuelled afternoons at Le Café Deux Mers? Have you still time to walk to the park, perhaps, smell those carmine-hued carnations you always adored?

Here I go again asking you a battery of questions! It seems that I can never stop wanting to extract every bit of precious information, as if answers were drops of rain in the desert of my mind. But then again, its especially true because, well, the windmills of my curiosity turn especially for you. Only you.

Look, I can’t conceal it anymore in metaphors, douse the queries in my mind in the perfume of neutral semantics. The truth is every memory I have, every flowy line in the annals of my remembrance is tinted with you, Luke. I need to know one thing: Am I also printed into your thoughts?

**

Fifteen years since I first tasted her honey-sweet name in my mouth, and Margaux still makes every single sentence encoded in my mind evaporate with just a single stroke of ink. I have no idea how she does it, but just an utterance from her and every entry in my vocabulary bank just disappears. Even now, just a passing recollection of those outdoor café conversations or her mellifluous voice, and I forget that I have built a flourishing career out of statements addressed to a judge.

She is undoubtedly indelible in my soul, my first and only romance. How can it be that I am too in hers?

**

Is that day we met at the Médiathèque Jacques Demy still dyed in your every fibre? Do you still smile whenever you recall me stumbling over the speech I’d edited and proofread in my brain just to compliment you on the copy of Madame Bovary in its original French that you were poring over? Goodness, you must have thought me weird; I could hear this voice inside me scream that you were going to march over to the librarian to report me pestering you and she’d give me notice of my banning from the library the next day. To my surprise, you flashed a smile whose solar brightness must have been immortalised by some poet and thanked me. As soon as you asked me if I wanted to sit with you and I deciphered affection in those eyes of grey marble, I knew my entire life had been rewritten.

**

Oh, if Margaux only knew how much that scene of her gently walking over to me replays in my mind like one of the films we’ve borrowed together to watch on the turquoise sofa she bought at a second-hand shop. Sometimes, in the middle of a litigation, I would clearly see her aquamarine eyes shimmering with an anxious excitement, that dress printed with marigolds flowing in waves with every step, and my breath would catch. On those days, I would put my mouth on autocue whilst my ears would resound with the remnants of her voice still recorded in my memory. I would sense the tingling of my hands at the imprint of her handshake on my nerves from years ago. Then, as if devouring the words of a favourite novel, I would dive back into every locution drafted in the electric air between us --- mine in chicken scratch, hers in fluid cursive.

If only she recognised how much our first encounter feels like the beginning of an epic in motion.

**

You know, sometimes, I wonder if you’ve kept any of the poems I’ve crafted for you, still live in the Versailles of Verse I’ve so happily built for you brick-by-stanza brick. Do you reach into a chest you’ve handpicked from a flea market, its painted flowers slightly flaking away, to travel back to that first, cobbled-together ode I penned for you? Do you sometimes turn on your computer just to unearth that grainy video of me at the Atlantide literary festival reciting a poem dedicated ‘to the Englishman I want to affix my heart to like a stamp’?

Well, yes, Luke. I admit I have saved every single lexical trinket between us. I cocoon myself in those loopy onyx strokes on that lavender poem drafts notebook I always carried around in my purse, the very same one you called me ‘adorable’ for toting around for. Yes, even the little tendrils of haiku you eked out on notepads and handed me with a quake. Ah, I can see you shaking your head now, but do you have any idea how much those small, square sheets of cornflower blue would dissolve any stress I felt that day like cardboard in a downpour?

Perhaps, my favourite of those flower buds of lines in rhythm was from the day I got my first literary magazine rejection email. Oh, how we discovered how one simple sentence ---‘However, we do not think our journal is the right place for your submission’ – had the sting of a billion flame-tipped arrows through marrow. I was slumped on my desk when you softly kissed me at my nape. When I turned around, there you were fiddling with your jumper as you offered me a note.

Three lines, seventeen syllables, an image of a snow flower – that was all it took for me to leap into your embrace and for joy to reinscribe itself in me. It was also all it took for me to push all my desires down my list to make room for a new one: to append your last name to my signature.

**

I still remember that haiku --- the idea of it scratching the surface of my mind, the sheer panic that washed my whole being in dark acrylic at offering my meagre verse to a decorated poet, the flow of blood, smooth as fountain pen ink, in me as she entwined her arms around me and pressed her lips on mine. There was no one else for whom I would abandon the grey of treatises and legal documents for flamingo pink words.

..which is why for an entire decade, I wrestled with myself for abandoning her instead.

**

But of course, it wasn’t to be. After two years of bliss encoded in both verbosity and the unspoken, you boarded the train to England without as much as a wave goodbye, without a conclusion to the epistle that was us.

Luke, it’s obvious I have only myself to blame. Perhaps, I was so adamant to seal myself off as your future bride that I scared you away with my intensity. All those fairy floss webs of metaphor, all the saccharine three-page long missives – that must have made you feel as though you were an insect, helpless and ready to be devoured.

As I minced the lines from the pieces I composed for you, it’s clear that there is only one message I need to send you, one that is of top priority: I’m so sorry.

**

It is here that I could finally understand how language can break hearts. How could Margaux marinate in such scathing critiques of herself when the clear culprit of our story ending was me?

For some reason, as soon as I realised that I had found the woman whose hands I wanted to write the conclusion of my life with, a question mark started to pop in my mind --- minuscule at first but growing until it consumed every syllable of my thoughts. I queried myself if it was right for me to deliver myself up to someone at such a tender age, to note but one recipient of my affections in my book of existence. I cross-examined myself until I was thoroughly convinced that I was going postal to consider marriage so young.

So, I left. When I returned to my South Kensington flat, I devoted myself to the texts I was to revise for the Bar, attempted to erase every trace of the woman who made me tie ribbons around the alphabet a shore away.

She wouldn’t leave me, though. Every potential partner I dated seemed to be an inferior photocopy of Margaux, her gold waves and the poetry of her warmth still etched into every cell of me.

But of course, she’d probably written me off, right? Well…

**

…and I apologise even deeper for what I’m about to ask of you.

In two weeks, I shall sign a contract at city hall to officially join my life to another. I suppose on paper Frédéric is that safe hearth I’ve alluded to in many a ballad. Frédéric who would smile at me from the front row of every book tour stop whenever I do my novel readings. Frédéric who, without fail, scribbles ‘I love you!’ on every takeaway container he brings home from the restaurant he owns. Steady Frédéric, the smooth clear stream who nourishes.

He’s no you, Luke. After so much time, it’s still you whose indigo has coloured my world permanently.

We’re due to wed on the 21st at two o’clock. Maybe, I’m just hanging on to declarations forged in rhyme and metre, but should my name still be ineffaceable in the manuscript of your consciousness, you know where to find me. Otherwise, I’ll understand, and I shan’t reach out to you anymore.

May my message of love be received. I'll be waiting.

Hanging on to your every word,

Margaux

**

That’s what brings me here to France. As I quickly jump out of the cab and race up the stairs leading to the mayor’s office, all I could see are the palaces of paragraphs in the sheet of correspondence in my pocket…and how they could all crumble to dust if I don’t speak now.

‘Margaux! Margaux, I love you. Je t’aime. Please come away with me. Come envelope me with hope. Come….not Margaux?’

A woman in a lace veil stares at me perplexed. Illuminated by the afternoon sun, I observe her auburn chignon and meadow green eyes.

‘You…you’re not Margaux,’ I sputter out.

‘But I am,’ she responds, her jade gaze examining my features.

‘Well, you can’t be my Margaux then. You’re not Margaux Petit.’

‘I…am, actually,’ she retorts, chuckling. ‘You know Petit is one of the most common surnames here in France, right?’

‘No,’ I can only groan. ‘Sorry. I got this letter and…’

‘A letter,’ she gasps out before turning to the officiant and her groom to ask to be excused. Once it was just the two of us, she crumples like a note.

‘No,’ Margaux exclaims. ‘That was supposed to be for Luke!’

‘But I am Luke,’ I insist.

‘Luke Benton?’

‘Oh, no. I’m Luke Renton. Sorry I have no idea who Luke Benton is. He’s…oh!’

‘That doesn’t sound good,’ Margaux comments as tears start to cascade down her cheeks.

‘I…bought my flat back in London from a solicitor also named Luke. He told me he’s moving to a bigger flat, one that fits…’

‘Right, but of course,’ she mutters. The bouquet of marigolds and wildflowers in her hands shakes as sobs overtake her lithe frame. She pauses, soundless, before straightening herself back up.

‘Well, in any case, I’m so sorry for dragging you all the way from England,’ she states. ‘God, who am I, ordering a summons to a stranger?’

‘No, it’s okay, Margaux. Listen,’ I respond. ‘I finally took a shot at happiness, something I should have grabbed when I could. Now, it’s not in the cards for me.’

‘Well, Luke, I…’

‘All the best wishes to you, okay? I might even send you a gift before I go back to the UK. You have my word.’

I turn and race back downstairs. It’s only when I’m out of the ornate, diadem-topped gate that tears start to flood over me, loose as watered-down ink. It’s time to pack, I guess. Return to sender. Delivery fai…

‘So, Luke Renton, is it?’

I whip my head and stare at the redhead bride who’d mistakenly poured her soul out to me, as though she were an overflowing pot of oak gall. Her wedding dress’ bottom now had a few dusty spots, and yet all I could focus on are a pair of verdant orbs pleading without uttering a syllable.

‘Margaux? What are you…?’

‘Luke, I know this is crazy, but what do you think of you enveloping me with hope this time?’