Parfait

Je pleure pour Narcisse, mais je ne m’étais jamais aperçu que Narcisse était beau. Je pleure pour Narcisse parce que, chaque fois qu’il se penchait sur mes rives, je pouvais voir, au fond de ses yeux, le reflet de ma propre beauté.

Regardez-vous, ces mots. Il n’y a rien à dire.

This feeling, as when I read the first page of Lolita, returned for only the second time these three years, when I read the prologue to L'Alchimiste of Paulo Coelho.

The wonder, the almost magical realization of perfection in prose and image.

I could not stop rereading and repeating this passage all throughout my metro ride to the CUPA office. Some middle school students were staring at me, in my ecstatic literary trance, probably wondering why the hell this crazy Asian girl was talking to herself.

belle.

It's Valentine's Day, having come and half gone without me realizing it. The part of me that has become cynical regards V-day as a silly, commercialized holiday, another excuse for companies to wring more money from the ever-spending, ever-expanding American population. Chocolates, roses, cards, champagne, strawberries...clichés of love that have lost the cachet of romanticism because now you can buy sugar free Russell Stover's chocolate, genetically modified unimpossibly fat roses at Costco, frilly pastel cards at Hallmark, pseudo faded yellow wine masquerading as Champagne and abnormally red, out-of-season strawberries at any random grocery store.

Ah, how cynical, how cynical. Where has your romanticism gone, oh Kate?

I respond: "It exists, stronger than ever, burning low, intense within the thickly padded chamber that is my heart."

You see?

I continue to believe in the perfect love. Perfect, as perfect as Nabokov's prose. As perfect as Sandor Marai's Embers. As perfect as Narcissus' insolent beauty, no more, because it is as beautiful without the insolence.