new

It wasn’t that first kiss 5 minutes past midnight in a bar off the Seine where we both realized that we were the only single ones in the room.

It wasn’t that last bottle of champagne that we drank as you walked me back to the apartment I was subletting for the winter, on the outskirts of the city, because the metro lines had stopped running hours before.

And it wasn’t because the key wouldn’t work in the door and you stayed to help me break in and didn’t laugh when the door burst open and I tumbled in, falling face first onto the bare dusty floor, taking a lamp with me, breaking the only light source in the room.

And I swear I wasn’t drunk, not when I invited you to stay and not when we made love on the cold hardwood, the outline of the Eiffel Tower barely visible over the row of early century houses that provided the only real view and certainly not when I whispered I love you and watched as our breathes, heavy, escaped as mist, mixing together to become fog that hung above us. And it wasn’t because I expected to hear it back or that I was lonely or because it was the only phrase in French I could say beyond “Where’s the bathroom”. It was because I knew, I just knew, as we lied there wrapped only in January air. I knew. New.