le temps de l'amour harry styles

i. juilliard drop out

WINE EITHER MADE ME REALLY ANNOYING OR REALLY HORNY.

No in between, no middle ground. One second I was my usual self, the next I was screaming from the top of a building for God to send me a miracle, life-changing hook up.

I wasn't an alcoholic, I swear. Great wine was one of my only weaknesses (along with pretty eyes and that one damn spot behind my left ear) and I indulged once in a while. Great wine was also the mastermind behind all my best work so to stop all consumption was just like taking a paintbrush from Da Vinci, right?

(I had once made that comparison to my mother. She shook her head and told me to take a nice cold shower, to which I responded that some people were just not and would never reach my level of genius. Next thing I know she snapped and threw her glass of icy water at my face, which — rude.)

Anyways, what were we talking about?

Wine. Good wine. Expensive wine. The one that came with its own personalized corkscrew and a handwritten letter from the CEO of the wine company (or whatever you called it).

That night, I remember it clearly despite the haze that had taken control of my body at that moment, I was sitting on my little vintage and decrepit balcony, a bottle of Pahlmeyer Merlot half-empty in my left hand and a pizza filled-paper plate in my right one. I didn't have any furniture on my balcony (not by choice, unfortunately; an ex of mine had thrown my authentic Toledo cafe chair on the sidewalk in a fit of rage when I dumped him. Yes, the sidewalk that was 8 floors below) so I was sitting on a blanket my abuelita had gifted me with when I was younger, a beautiful handmade masterpiece in shades of white, brown and deep blue. The heatwave that had hit the Big Apple in the past couple of days was still as suffocating as ever so I was only wearing a cropped tank top and some cotton underwear, way too liquid-happy to care about any of my neighbors' eyes that could be watching me that evening.

My studio in Chelsea was small but cozy, the fact that I had been living there for three years making it completely a home and not just four walls, one bed and clothes everywhere. I had so many memories in this apartment and a lot of pictures could be found all around the open aren of my kitchen, my bedroom, my living room and my bathroom. Living there had surprisingly become more confortable than going back to France, these days.

I was originally from some little town in France, but my origins were all over the place; my mother, Alejandra La Perla, was from a family that had spent the past centuries or so in Mexico City, its origins able to be traced back to the foundation of the city. The La Perla's were a relatively rich family who lived in a nice big house and owned a couple of businesses since forever, so it was not that surprising to know that they had had enough money to pay for their only daughter to come study in her dream destination, which was France at the time. She studied arts in Paris, graduated early as the smartest in her own delegation, met my dad, Benjamin Dumontier, a half-Black, half-Persian classical orchestra leader apprentice at that time, and the rest is history. They married in 1992 in the Jardin des Tuileries illegally on a hot June evening, one of their friends being a guard unlocking the doors and another one acting as the officiant. It was lovely, or so my maman says, tears in her eyes as she holds the few polaroids she still got from that night.

I was born in 1994, on July 17th, at exactly 2:17 in the evening. My parents had argued for days about how they would name me; my dad wanted to call me Josée to honor his deceased adoptive mother and my mom wished to call me Josephina for her own aunt that was gone too soon. They ended up calling Joséphine, but my dad still called Josée when mom wasn't there and she too sometimes called me Josephina. I was a healthy baby, passed all the tests without any problem or anomaly and the doctors let our little family go our own way, my poor father holding back tears every time I yawned or blinked, apparently.