There is a garden in a suburb of Paris I have never seen. A square wooden table and wrought-iron chairs weathered by decades, lilies bending in the rain. In our bed, you described this garden; for some reason, I wept. It was a place enravishingly familiar, as if I had known it long ago and had held it, always, close in memory. Then I thought it might be a future memory, something awaiting us. But I did not know then it was our last afternoon. The window was open and we could hear the trees.
Places described by a lover are like no other places on earth. To learn a city in this way – boulevards curving, canals, cornices overhead – in the naked embrace, the luxury of listening while your skin is listening. The city slips into your body. And then, if you are fortunate enough to arrive there for the first time with that same lover, or more fortunate still to arrive there after many years with the same lover – then you will enter the place as if in a dream.