Even though Francesco you are not going to come and you are not going to come again and you are turning it over and over again deciding that you are not going to come, part of me--that young woman I still in many ways am, waits for you in that room of summer, darkened by leaves. The leaves:-they were larger than our hands and for hours I watched them turning over and over in the warm breeze, light and shadow, against that stone wall, while I on a perfectly white bed waited, and turned and turned again. And in hindsight my love, in retrospect I already know, and yet still, I reason, I call it reason, maybe, maybe this time...

And you are not going to come again, not this time, not any time not in that way, while I wait for you. It was just the person I was then. Thinking my charms might somehow--silly of me, naive of me. Holding everything in abeyance, before resignation set in, but it never did Francesco--in the abeyance, in the suspension where I am twenty in a kind of permanent, in that leafy room and still I am waiting for you and again you are not going to come. You will call it one of my Marienbad moments and we will laugh, and I will miss you all the more and sigh but this time affectionately. I am still heartbroken. You brush the hair from my face and ask do you have fever? And we laugh, because it looks as if I am going to die, what an absurd turn of events, and how could waiting for you be so dangerous, and loving you. Across the room at a party now I see you--and there is still no one I would rather love--or have love me.