Dear Paris;

My mother was a Chinese acrobat. A trapeze artist, at that. You may have heard of her; she was famous once, before she married. She used to dangle high above the crowd in Yokovski's traveling circus, landing flips over the third ring in Russia, in the Ukraine, in Saudi Arabia, South Africa. Quite famous. I've been told that she looked like a firebird, the way that they dressed her, in red and gold feathers with long, feathered lashes.

I myself only saw her perform once, in the Ukraine, when I was no more than four, looking up from behind the balustrade, following Jeb the cotton candy man and tugging at the corner of his apron. Or twice, I suppose. See, I was born fifty feet off the ground, beneath the red and white stripes of a big top, with the strong man and a lion tamer belaying the midwife, and a pair of Siamese funambulists spotting.

But then, this all happened a very long time ago, as my mother has since left the show business. We traveled with Yokovski's circus for a couple of years, always on a train painted with red and white stripes, on the car behind the elephants, chugging along foreign rails and living on peanuts and leftover cotton candy. All of this, the circus life, with people coming from miles around to watch my mother turning triple axles over their heads. I am told that she was very talented, though I suppose that fame doesn't necessarily imply talent, and so I will leave that for you to decide. But it is what I'm told.

At any rate, this all ended when we reached France, and found herself a mime; a nice quiet man from Paris, with a taste for the whitest of wines, which he drank from the cleanest of glasses, so that it appeared that he was drinking nothing at all. And perhaps he was. My mother told me that their eyes met across the arena, and that he came to her after the show and brushed the glitter from her face and offered her a ride on an invisible motorbike, to show her the city lights. But she always said it with a weakness in her voice, and that weakness always called me to recall just how graceful I was always told that she was. Before, at least.

But my train departs soon. I believe it stops over briefly in Frankfurt. I am safe to say that; by the time that anyone reads this letter, I will be long gone. Should there be another letter, I doubt that you, dear Paris, will ever see it. That said,

-Adieu