I watch you as you sleep, and I write this in my head, thinking of all the times in your life when you’ll have to leave, someone or something or somewhere, but most of all someone. I think of the times I’ve had to leave, and leave again. I think of how much of life is rehearsals for departure. I think of Françoise, and I think of those words of Maya Angelou’s: that when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. Picasso in the restaurant with his partner, Dora Maar, walking the few steps over to where Françoise was sitting to offer her a cherry from his 153bowl. The fifth thing I’d tell you: I wish you godspeed, in all those times to come.

vi

In a room not far from this room, now, in which I write, I told a man to close his eyes. I unbuttoned his shirt, all seven buttons, and then each cuff, and eased it from his shoulders and let it fall. I undid his trousers, the clasp and button and zip, eased them off too, and helped him step from them. When he was fully naked, I untied the halter of my dress and stepped from it. I raised his arms in the air and lifted the dress and slipped it over his arms onto him, the fluid silk soundless as it fell to the ground, and I stepped behind him and tied the ribbon straps around his neck. I could feel his quickened breath, his heart, as if it were my own. I walked a few steps from him, then stood. Open your eyes and walk to me, I said, and he did, and he did; and I understood something I hadn’t before about desire.

Find someone, I would tell you, to whom you can say all the things you can never say. Look: I can make two people walk into a room, and have them do things to each other of which they may or may not have dreamed. I can make time run backwards, or take a different course entirely. I can summon the dead. It is a terrible kind of sorcery, and one I would not bequeath to you. That’s the sixth thing. Art as merely a surfeit of desire, these words the currency of unspent love. 154

vii

And now the seventh, final thing, the most banal and profound of all. Tell the people you love that you love them. It will be the only thing, in the end, that counts for anything; the only thing we can take with us. Say it, now. Those small, quotidian, transfiguring words.

I wonder how old you’ll be when you read this, and if I’ll be gone, and of the dark magic that there is after all a way of telling you this, of putting it somewhere so that one day, when you need it, you might understand