Watching a film today, curled up on the invariably burgundy plush, my head tucked close to my sister's, whispering ideas she's already had, and I think. The appeal of a visual world is so seductive; it's hard to find an honest word in portraiture. And as the story turns itself inside out for me, I learn the settings to heart. Thin white-washed European walls behind the sophisticated heroine-- her slick leather jacket, tightly woven scarf in perfect contrast to the light snow on the streets of Paris. The water is blue, blue, blue, washing up onto the burning white sand. The curtains flutter in memory of warmer days, their elegant, prettily striped linen flush with grace. People move differently. They have secrets to make themselves lovely. Know the value of discretion and you learn allure. The pictures are rawer in Europe, more alive, lips swollen with promise. Love is more careless there, and more important. Writers travel narrow roads tightly wound around the bend, their eyes watching. Waiting.

Not like here, this place of narrow minds and wider streets. Here everything is more beautiful somewhere else.

If an author is writing a sequel to one of Jane Austen's classic novels, it is an occasion for unaffected delight. I am not one to go become violently ill over language a little less lively and sparkling than the original; or perhaps a certain touch of the banal in the plotline. But-- I should think that it is only reasonable to be hope the author would be sensible of any true impropriety in her novel.

For example, this is simply not acceptable. Nor this, its utterly wretched and vulgar companion.

And anyone who would write such idiotic tripe such as this or this and especially this ought to be locked in a room with Mrs. and Lydia Bennet along a good quantity of lace.

Those who Jane Austen hath joined together, let no sequel writer put asunder.

There's an empty space on my wall where a dress used to hang, and it hurts to look at it. Like thin coils of wire and cardboard boxes, and impassive stares at where you used to sleep and dream. Then turning, closing the door softly in memory of all the times you slammed it shut, glorying in the noise. There are tea stains on my textbook, and I look at the slender, straight lines of writing. I play soft, slow piano music with melancholy vocals. Sometimes I just want to run away, to feel the concrete slipping away from me as I flee towards the horizon. A loft apartment somewhere, with dim red lamps and champagne in the closet. A place where you could litter the floor with the NY Times Book Review and old issues of Vogue. Walking around in a man's shirt and khakis, forever pushing up your half-moon reading glasses, admiring the bell tones of bracelets on your arm. Books, secondhand, battered ones with stained brown with peppermint tea-- it's a comforting to know how predictable you are. The neighbour two floors down smokes, and as you walk by, you catch a glimpse of a man in his forties, idly rolling a cigarette over coffee. His robe is half-open, and you wonder if that old musician ever gets dressed in the mornings, and if he's really seeing the bluebird thirties-ish woman, and if the paint that seeps into the creases of her hands bothers him. It's raining, and you know that Hemingway would have ended there, but there's so much more poetry in this world. It's kinetic, you remember saying once.

There's an empty space somewhere, somewhere that it can't be seen.