Eiffel

Dear Levi,
Last night I stood with Steven at the top of the Eiffel Tower on the French Boulevarde, and we watched a lovely golden moon rise above the soft golden streetlights of Kharkov. This newest mall is so lovely, complete with wrought-iron balustrades and the very newest edition to the McDonald's chain in our city. The autumn sky was very black and dark, the wind a light whisper across my bare shoulders. My hair is so long now, it plays with the breeze several inches from my collar bone in the back. I know you'd love it.
As I stood there with him in the dark and quiet, you were on my mind. You almost always are. I thought about bringing you to my city, and how it may never happen. I thought about how nice it would be to bring you here for the sole purpose of understanding me better. I don't think you ever really understood me. And when the intrigue wore off into frustration, you gave up and walked away. What do you know of Russian women? The way a Ukrainian girl puts on the nicest pair of Chanel highheels and carefully picks her away across broken asphalt streets, along rotting cement walls rank with the smell of urine and dead cats, and pretends the world is beautiful under a Parisian moon at the new mall? How would you ever understand the terror and panic that builds up inside her, to survive this place? To fight for something better? And how would you understand the love in her heart that runs as deep and old as the 360-year-old cobblestones in the square downtown, the love that won't let her heart free from missing yours? No, you didn't understand and you didn't want to, in the end. You wanted a simpler, more shallow life.
And I hope that you found it. I hope that you are happy, with your coworker/classmate/lover at your side day in and day out. You used to say that you felt broken and worthless, when you looked at your car and your home. But no one in my country our age has their own car, not even me. And your home is within the call of church bells and welfare agents. You would never know what broken and worthless feels like until you came here and saw me carry stagnant, murky water inside a half-built laugh of a building and washed the blood and clay of construction mortar from my hands, while the sweat trickled down my back and no AC within a thousand miles to escape to. No fast stop at OnCue for a slushie. How I longed for one when I got off the bus in Lubnisk, in the dead of night on the bumpy grueling ride from the capitol to my city, and I staggered to the public restrooms on the edge of the bus lot. Rotting cement and rancid mildew huddled in form of a shelter over a dark hole that descended underground to the restrooms. Dark holes, splashed over with festering vomit, blood, and feces. A broken sink and scraps of a bar of lye soap leered under a shattered mirror in the center of the open room. Open, with no privacy. I had known this smell, this feeling, since a child. And I just closed my eyes and pushed away the thoughts, much like I taught myself to close my heart and push away the anguish so I wouldn't break down the past eight months.
But when I got back on the bus, I opened my eyes and remembered. I remembered your white collared shirt and the feel of soft carpeting against my skin as we shared a sweet, innocent Sunday afternoon together. I remember your lips finding mine and the bliss of that moment. I remember the fascination of calculus on paper, and falling asleep in your proximity.
Like the dark fields slipping by outside the window of the bus, I was remembering what was gone forever.
Your Star,
Rigel