Flights of Fancy

dinner date at the federal prison

Bordeaux is the color of my lungs when they're deflated and surgically removed from my body, but it's also the city where I lost my heart. My father told me I shouldn't trust French girls, but he didn't know how hot this one was.

She liked to order blue drinks and throw them sideways to make me look at the vanishing trail of blue liquid as it rapidly flew by and hit the ground six feet away from us. She called it gin and sonic.

I thought she was gorgeous, but she also smelled a bit like sulfur. I felt more and more out of breath every time we kissed. Her accent didn't sound French. In fact, it sounded like she was from Vietnam.

But I liked her a lot, how she loved to lick her lava lips looking at me, eternally engulfed in her eccentric eyes, how soothing her skin was serving me with a second-degree burn. It's complicated to comment on her complexion and come up with a cunning connection, but over the hours she originated an aura of opalescent opulence I honestly adored over and over.

Ultimately, she was my demise. They told me not to play with fire, but I never thought they meant it literally. The good doctor said I suffered from pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. I asked what that was, and he spoke a verbose sentence or two of words I didn't connect with. I told him to explain it to me like I was an ornament. He said it was basically silicosis. I said why didn't you say that immediately. He said his parents moved here from Italy over thirty years ago.