There is so much life in everyone eyes, until there isn’t.

I woke him up at midnight. He was having a nightmare again. I nudged him first, trying to wake him gently. He didn’t. As his breath shortened and he squeezed his eyes tight, as if he was in real pain, I put my hands on his shoulders and shook him — this time, firm. He shot his eyes wide open, his face damp with sweat, still breathing hard. I had never seen him like that.

“Hon, you were dreaming.” He pressed my hand — the one on his right shoulder — hard. In the dark, he stared at me as if he couldn’t register who I was. There was an emptiness in his eyes. Something in his expression scared me, so much that I shook from the inside. I gathered myself, louder this time, with more confidence.
“Guido, you were dreaming.”

I didn’t want to show a trace of my fear. Deep inside, the thought haunted me. What was causing my lover to have nightmares, sometimes twice a week? He would wake up in the morning with no interest in talking about them. I asked him once, while he was sipping his coffee, leaning on the kitchen counter, what these dreams were about. He looked at me as if I was saying something crazy.

“What dreams?”

The morning after, early at six, I go to the library to study. It’s a Friday, and we usually make our weekend plans before then. This time we didn’t, and I want to know if we’re getting together with any friends. In the campus corridor, I use the public telephone to call our landline. The phone rings through more than ten long beeps before he picks up. His voice is groggy, and he tells me he’s not in the mood for anything social.

I pause, wanting to ask what’s going on, but I don’t want to have this conversation over the phone. We’ve only been dating eight months, and I know there’s still so much about him I don’t know at all. In the bare silence between us, he asks,

“Do you know where Honfleur is?”
“No.”
“It’s about three hours north of Paris. I’m thinking we go there for the weekend.”

When I get to the studio, he shares more, telling me the place we can stay is his grandmother’s house, now rented to an older couple who were her friends. The attic — where he and his brother slept during their summer vacations — is still exactly as it was twenty years ago, and we can stay there.

Saturday morning, we hit the road early with our rented car. We stop for lunch in a city called Vernon. As part of the Normandy region, I learn that the four C’s are what we should cherish: cream, camembert, cider, and calvados. The latter is what he’s having now. The late-summer sun reflects on the mahogany-colored drink inside the crystal glass.

“Traditionally, people would have a shot between heavy meals to make a hole, to eat more.”
He downs the shot and cuts a small triangular piece of camembert. I watch him in his white cotton t-shirt, he looks good. How relaxed and cheerful he is now. His eyes — those restless dark holes that could undress a moment — are shining now, last night they were…don’t know what. They were gone somewhere far away.

What he said lingers in my mind: the calvados making a hole so you can take in more. His eyes do the same to me — they make a hole inside me, a space to live more. I keep looking at him. He’s eating, and when he eats he’s fully concentrated; he barely talks.

I remember the first time he cooked for my Persian friends, and when everyone left, as we were going to bed, he was so angry — for one simple reason: he was complaining that they talked so much they didn’t even appreciate the food. I didn’t reply; I smiled.

The stairs to the attic on the top floor are narrow. The wooden steps squeak under our weight as we climb. The attic room is separated from the staircase by a door that isn’t tall enough to pass through without bending — even for me. Imagine Guido, with the height he has.

Inside, there’s a small queen bed with quilted beige bedding, a tiny window on the only straight wall overlooking the sea, and an ornamented cabinet leaning against the wall at my shoulder height. The walls are painted a dusty pink, and small framed French Baroque paintings hang all around the room. Everything has the warmth of a grandmother’s house: tidy and clean, with the faint smell of old-school body cream lingering in the air.

I sit on the bed and check the frame resting on the nightstand. Two small golden frames connected at the hinge, folded open to stand. Inside, two black-and-white portraits of young boys. I pick it up and angle it toward the light. It’s not difficult to recognize him and his brother; his eyes stare at me through the aged stain of the glass. Softer. Tranquille, like the sea was today.

“So cute,” I say.

He looks over my shoulder. “Shit, my hair — what the hell were they thinking, giving bangs to a boy?”

“It looks good on you.”

“I look like a watermelon.”

I laugh out loud. “Watermelon?”
I remember I meant to cut some for the beach and forgot. It’s still hot, and a cold bite of watermelon after swimming is fun. After a nap, he change into his speedo swimsuit, a towel around his neck, packing snacks. I change and tuck the wine bottle and the baguette we bought from the corner bakery into my striped, white-navy beach tote.

We descend the stairs, passing the entrance door on the ground floor. The bell beside it catches my attention. It’s golden, with a circular frame in British green. It feels medieval.
Later, he tells me Honfleur is a medieval city. We walk toward the beach, it’s only five minutes’ walk. We need to pass the street his grandmother house is in, Ave du Littoral and take a windy path between trees to the beach. I ponder on the street name, du Littotal means of the shore. It’s a coincidence that in French littoral and English literal look similar.

When we arrive at the beach, I’m surprised not to be able to see the water. The vast shore seems to have taken over the sea bed; on the horizon I can see a blue line, maybe kilometres away. I’m sure when we arrived, before our nap, it was much closer. We settle at the bottom of the quay walls. I put my bag down on the sand, which feels more like a mudflat.

“Wow! Where did the water go?”

“Honfleur, It’s known for intense tides.”

He showed me, as we were driving through the city, the channels of the Seine connected to the sea and told me that beyond the sea bed, the narrow channels at the mouth of the Seine, plus the geographic shape of the land, create one of the most dramatic tidal currents in the world — sometimes between two and seven metres in a single day.

We walk toward the water but halfway we give up; the mud is not pleasant to walk on, and it looks like we’d need at least half an hour to reach the sea. We might miss the sunset by the time we get back to our spot. Instead, we open the bottle and lie down on our beach mat. No glasses — we drink straight from the bottle and tear the baguette with our hands. After the first bite, while I’m still chewing, he starts kissing my lips. One hand in my hair, the other holding my head with force. I need to breathe and swallow the bread; I pull away for a second and take a quick sip from the bottle so I can chew faster.

“Take this stupid thing off.”
He means the top of my bikini. He wants me to feel comfortable being topless in public. I’m still working on it. This time, I open the clasp at the back and drop the red top on the mat. I lie down as he bends toward me, this time kissing me on my neck.

I think of the combination: lying on a Normandy coast, topless, a bottle of wine in my hand, while a man kisses me on the lips. I imagine my grandmother for a moment — the contrast of her life and mine. Only two generations apart, and she never touched another man besides her husband, from the age of sixteen. His voice brings me back.

“Promise you don’t die before me.”
As always, I can never predict where his mind goes. Why talk about dying under such a beautiful sunset, when we are half-naked, kissing beneath a sky painted in magical hues of orange and blue?

I take my time, staring at the sky. Registering what he just said.
Then I realize: it means he thinks he will die sooner.

I can’t imagine that. I turn to face him, touching his spiky stubbles on his cheeks, moving my point finger between his chin and the start of the softer skin, we hold our gaze, his stare is intense and wild. The tag line of a movie I watched recently comes to my mind as much as I don’t want it. There is so much life in everyone eyes, until there isn’t. I whisper.

“No promises.”

The night ends with more calvados, drinking with his grandmother’s friends as they tell stories from when they were young, travelling the world. I never imagined I could get so drunk with eighty-year-olds. How do French people drink this much at that age? When we go back up to the attic, we are completely toasted. Before closing his eyes, he says, almost matter-of-fact, that his recurring nightmare is losing his entire family in a war, buried under the debris of destroyed buildings.

“Now, I see you too.”