If anyone asks now, I tell them: Paris is a beautiful city. I’ve never not thought this.

I hear she’s not there anymore, and I guess for a time she and it, the city, were one and the same, as in, she was there and I was not. I’m in this city, and six hours at the speed of sun separated us even before either of us stood up to move. Facetime and texts and emails made it easier but how easy could it be.

If anyone asks now: no, there wasn’t a happy ending. I’ve never expected one.

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The sun is golden and it splashes against the golden sand battered by the golden waves with the golden seafoam washing like molten steel over the endless forever gold of the coast forever eating at the land forever sinking into the golden ocean.

Time does move forward here, seconds piling on top of seconds like the grains of sand formed by the sighing yield of the craggy titans cliffs; a surrender by inaction, rocks and boulders and rough stone facing a forced retreat into infinitesimilarity to dust. It is nothing, and what was left – the places we built and lived in and told each other stories in and laughed and cried and fucked and slept and woke and slept again were hollowed out long ago before the sea (the golden sea) moved in to take the place of our long forgotten ghosts.

And in the water the sand swirls by the backwash of the waves and beneath the surface it sifts and what we knew settles down down down until the light – the golden sun – is nothing but a haze and it’s far and it’s cold at the bottom and nothing moves anymore not because it can’t but because it’s sunken.

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Observant observers can observe such observances:

They lie in the grass, spooned together. They are younger than I am, in their late teens, and a study in contrasts. Of the two, he is the slim and willowy one, a body constructed with a dancer’s build. His hair is ribboned in dreadlocks. He wears a colorful chapeau, an oversized t-shirt, and denim shorts. Her hair is straight, a long and Nordic blonde. She wears a bit of flesh on top of muscle, but it suits her constitution amiably. Her skirt extends to the calves, but it is split and not fully buttoned on the side. The size of her breasts makes her top swell.

I’ve been witness to moments like these. It fills me with a sense of regret, sadness, hope, and happiness all at the same time. It’s a strange mixture.

When my look returns to them, her skirt is bunched up. His hand has shifted to the outside of her thigh, where the contact is less blatant than before. The fingers tickle up and down between the line of the muscles. She covers his dusky palm with hers and scratches. His grasp on the smooth, pale skin is passive instead of possessive, though sexual all the same. She curls her bare foot against his and stretches her arm behind her to clasp the back of his head.

I imagine moments like these to be sun-drenched and over-exposed, like any bright Spring day should be, with colors too-vibrant and blown out. And I ache, a little.

She lives lit up in tiny screens nowadays, with the bright Parisian sun filling in the air around the pictures and sounds. Her hair seems blonder, brighter, in swoops and curls, brought up one day and then flopping fashionably around her face the next. Her voice, too, sounds so colored with French, as if the cuisine has altered the very movements and gestures of her tongue.

And here, with the rainy month of April refusing to give way, it makes me feel like everything around me is so pedestrian and monochromatic. A gray New York is instantly dirty and grimy, like the forgotten and discarded day-old newspapers collecting and brooding in the corners of subway cars. The frequent showers make it all a runny and cold soup.

I tell her of work and stress and things that I shouldn’t be wasting our time with, and it fills me with regret as soon as it leaves my lips. She smiles and I forget my cares. It’s the feeling of missing her that makes it so bittersweet.

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Haven’t we all felt the desire to manipulate the fast currents of time as we drift towards the inevitability of the universe?

Tonight, I want to linger, I want to stop time. I want to seize it, bend it, break it wide open, charging each endless moment with you, losing myself in fulfilling every one of your deepest, darkest desires.

And these deep, dark desires are very much worth reading.

To be honest, no, I probably wasn’t ever going to watch Sucker Punch. But, I suppose there was a chance I could have seen it, or could have wanted to see it, or could have been suckered into seeing it based on the over-stylized commercials and cheap appeal to my repressed and hormonal inner-teen.

But this about seals the deal:

Sucker Punch is an awful movie. You probably have heard that by now. What is really amazing is that it is so bad that I keep thinking about it. I dissect it as I try to identify every little thing wrong with it. My core problem is that the story is shit and I have literally seen better character development from stories told by children on the playground. It is stunningly awful.

I trust Shon Richards. With erotica, and porn, and nerdery, and shit to geek out over, and well, a lot. He’s a guy I can hang with.

So why do I bring up this awful movie at all? I have been in a creative personal slump. Work stress and health stress has eaten away at my creativity and like all insecure artists, I started doubting my ability to tell a story.

Then I see a trashy abortion like Sucker Punch and realize, “Fuck, even a Internet porn writer like myself could do better shit than this.”

Shon: you do way better shit, all the time.