She lived in a house with her cat near a prawn farm in Goa Velha, palms and banana trees overlooking her windows. She rode a motorbike, played the piano, looked stunning in her emerald green cocktail dress and short hair highlighted blonde and brown, wrote passionate letters to me in French, smudged with ash from her cigarettes...

...which fit all the stereotypes I needed it to fit, my subconscious basking in the soft glow of a million clichés. After all, wasn't Goa the place to which the distance could only be measured in time and not space? There would always be a Goa trip somewhere in the near future, with beaches and booze and colourful shirts and Hemingway-esque male bonding. The planning of said trip was often the sum total of the catching up. Therapeutic, indeed, like window shopping.

Halfway between longing and self-awareness — halfway between the pure ideal and the clarity of an unconquerable darkness — she descends on my soul like moonlight. Like a soft, impossible saudade. 

And her voice returns —

« Votre âme est un paysage choisi

Que vont charmant masques et bergamasques

Jouant du luth et dansant et quasi

Tristes sous leurs déguisements fantasques. »

And when I try to picture her now, the edges blur: was it really an emerald dress, or just the green of the bottle glass scattered on the floor of my mind? 

Goa, her, the letters — all banished now to some salt-stained corner of time...