What Was Today. (Julien Poirier)

I got up with morning at 7 (which has almost never happened) having finally slept a full 8 hours and began reading over my soy hot chocolate. I read the book that my high school sweetheart self-published in 1988. It was my Christmas present, although I am sure he gave me lots of other things that year too. His writing style is almost the antithesis of mine, if that’s possible in the same language from individuals from identical cultural backgrounds, and I don’t think I got it back in 1988 or '89 or '90…. I had remembered phrases “poured a three-piece trashed denim on” and “I don’t know you little boy, gun to head” and “Tim, we’ll talk together” (Tim is the young man I almost left Julien for shortly before he completed the book) and lots of talk of the swirling of smoke. And I remember the phrases I uttered at one point or another that, with my permission, he took possession of, and now they title the book “what was today” and begin the stories “I can hear a telephone ringing forever again”. The book made me proud, but its contents that I loved best were the “For Lilia” (at the very beginning) and the photo of me in front of the shutters in Rome on page 49. He has written in pen under the front cover “something to say that will make you, in twenty years, think back to me, or in twenty years, turn to me and kiss me….” I remember all that, and strangely, reading the book this morning, 16 years later, I might finally get it.