France
The gardens'

Yes, oh yes. France was my first expedition to begin my legacy,
I held my father's words tight in my palm when I first stepped onto the land of expensive champagne and monophonic chansons.
The zephyr made me feel the weight of a feather, this land was the perfect place to get wine-drunk and spill out my words in vinous lettering. Little did I know, walking through those mossy trees and gardens with those archetypal poppies that bedecked the streets left and right, that somewhere hidden in the flowers was a muse, my beautiful awakening. Antoinette, her hair like the gold of an early dawn's hue, her eyes an endless green like evergreens in a snowstorm. Her freckles dappled on her face like paint splattered art, her lips naturally stained blush from the wine she drinks
on Tuesdays. Her skin like honey maybe a little almond, her jackets' always made of fleece-like her boots of fur. She walks like the flit of birds on a summer morning, her moves so agile like her expression so flawless.
I could've almost stopped midway through my writing just by seeing her.
Oh Antoinette, your soul with such novelty, you stole the words lingered
in my head and we wrote our haikus on colonial park-benches and we got drunk after the Thursday matinées. You were the swindler to my vines and you hung onto every word like the flowers that hung from our balcony. Your hair silky like muslin and your hands warm like cotton.
Oh, and for those nine months I stayed with you, it was like my originality shifted into a field of lilacs, my love for you evermore and my words lost. How can you, someone whose awestruck by the lexicon of a writer, be so proud to show off in competition with a wordsmith?
Antoinette, your poems a con and your love for me, a eulogy I can mourn. My first love, so desperate in the avenues of darkness but so wonderfully found. 

During the months I've stayed, you could say I was a little
unmoored going into a new country all by myself. I packed light, four maybe five cigarettes, some clothes, and a camera. Though beauty is something so rare to me, I still find nature just as delicate.
Pretty scenery puts me in a liberating place, a place to think and write.
So, for about the first three weeks of my stay, I went to the French gardens, the gardens were gorgeous, the symmetry and its pastel-like colors oddly inspired my words.
I sat on the same park bench everyday, turning my grief into gold, pouring letters down into a scarlet flood. How I yearned to see her everyday, I watched her from afar. I admired everything she did, how she never walked past the ancient mall, she never would glance at people twice. 
Me, though, she took third and fourth glances, which made me question, did my acts of benevolence bewilder you? It was like opaque gray for a few weeks. But when I saw you come from the late-night operetta, I had to ask.
I felt this penchant as I approached you, the smell of Rosé and cigarettes put me in a moment of ambivalence, but compelled, I asked you,

"What's a woman like yourself with such solitude?" Is the question I asked to push the petal on all disasters. You looked at me and vacillation vexed your eyes and sharpened your lips. You told me isolation was insurmountable, but I think not, and I was right. That's when I grabbed your hand,
"Follow me." Are the words I spoke in the dark and lead you to the inn I was staying at. At the bar, you yearned for Cabernet and Grenache but you ordered the Rye instead. We indeed drank, which became a dalliance too hard to overcome, and when it drifted we lost each-other in a fume of cognac mildew.

       In  the renewal of leaves and life, springtime approached and we had
written a novel of all our clueless wisdom and witty classiness. I do have to say though, you inspired me in such great words. You were the pagan to my soul and my poems were all sagebrush happy and selfless. You'd think of a wordsmith as selfish but he is not of that, he takes the wisdom of others and creates an anecdote and with such beautiful articulation he is non of selfish. Oh, Antoinette, we were fools to ever think it could've ever worked out. With the townspeople and their drunken bitch talking after we had made our reservation on the gardens'. They looked at us and laughed, "Fool." I wanted to buy you a garden, you knew yourself all too prone to lies and you told me your favorite flower was lilacs. I painted you with soft green and pink but you didn't like that, I wrote you with the most golden my words could be, but you didn't want that. So what did you want Antoinette? Did you want me to become the alpine in your rock garden or the sword to your stem? I had no clue what you wanted from me, it was sweet sapphire in the sage months and blackened begonias in the blush months. What had I done to lose you? Were my words too equivocal? My humor too pretentious? You'd wrote in delicate prose because you were cautious of my opinion, but Antoinette your writing was phenomenal. Coming from a wordsmith, your words deeply inspired me. I am sorry for the things we forgot and the things we remember. You were the plinth for my pining and the age to my eve. I will always remember you, Antoinette, in those gardens' you'd play, erstwhile in isolation, then with another soul.
All before the veil; wine-love and us. Tell me though, did the diaphanous coverlet I threw over your woe wake you into a land where
isolation was surmountable?

Can I ask one last thing, Antoinette?
Do you still take walks in the gardens?