Roman Lives Here Too
by Marianna Maruyama ︎︎︎“Roman lives here too.” Words scratched in the doorframe. I didn’t know him well. He lived alone, orphaned, grew up in the ‘80s. Sensitive and very good looking, sexy. That’s it. We were about the same age I guess. It was mid-April.
A few days later we met for the second time. Stopped on the way to pick up medicine for arrhythmia then waited for him under a gothic spire. Roman at his side on leash and muzzle. We kissed once and quickly. In the park, elderly Germans revisited their Breslau.
Roman led us across the Odra. In this other Venice I looked everywhere but in his eyes: at the short grass, my bare knees, the soft sky. We couldn’t speak. I wasn’t sure what it meant. We crossed back over the river.
A few months before we’d met, he’d stopped drinking booze so he didn’t know why he had a hangover that morning. He stepped out to buy sugar for his coffee and I waited barefoot in the kitchen. I was 23 and liked being in a foreign kitchen waiting for a man to make me coffee.
That day, I claimed April 18 as my personal New Year’s Day. It was just before Poland joined the EU. By now I know how things move in cycles – especially the personal, especially the political. New Year’s day can be any day of the year and it’s up to us to choose, but most of us don’t know that, or have forgotten that, or just don’t see the point in changing it. But that April when they danced out loud, even I joined in, walked side by side across bridges, balanced on curbs, kept my eyes open and closed in equal measure. I saw a miniature replica of Wroclaw’s cathedral made entirely of sugar cubes. A few weeks later, after all the parties, the shots, the firecrackers, the noise, the libations, the darkness that followed, I left for a period. I dreamt I wrote him a letter but had forgotten to mail it: Do you remember taking that boat across the river? You spread your coat out over our legs. All of Venice was cold and damp, but we were dry.