Benjamin: Can you ski?

Cecily: My skiing skills are restricted to drinking glühwein in a glamorous fur hat via Joan Collins and flirting with chalet men. So yes, I ski well.

Cecily: I need to get out of bed and get some wine, but bed is so womb-like right now. I can’t believe womb trumps wine. Fucking Freud.

Cecily: I’m going out! I’m going to find love!

Harry: Well shit darling. Paint the town red. Fall in love for me.

Cecily: I’m going to try. And let him be humble yet wealthy, into good food and jazz, and not gay.

Harry: Well shit darling. That sounds difficult to find.

Cecily: I am stewing in my malaise. Come rescue me?

Harry: I’m just relaxing, watching a funny old French film.

Cecily: There is a dog. He brings malaise.

Cecily: “Unsex me here, and fill me from the crown to the toe top-full of direst cruelty…”

Alexander: I think that perhaps in fostering such neuroses concerning your burgeoning relationship, you may be spelling its doom.

Cecily: Idealism is what keeps Paris running; well, the endless conflict between idealism and truth.

Ishmael: No, it is the truth which keeps Paris alive; it falls between idealism and depression.

Cecily: You stride into my life with a smile and a talent for atmospheric brilliance that neither fades nor changes in your absence, but merely gets farther away. That is something very special. To get further away and yet not lose efficacy. Rarely does a thing or a person do that. But you. And to do it without expense, but to give the parts of yourself that are renewable. That, my dear friend, is sustainability.

Cecily: There is a Jack Russell here playing with a lit up toy, and I miss my cat’s indifference and your logic.

Delilah: You need more friends.

Cecily: Are you bored of Alexander?

Delilah: Not bored. But you’re a well-bred woman of the world. One assumes you have all manner of interesting conversations with people possibly willing to try some harder drugs. Just a suggestion. If you keep filling from the same vial you’re eventually going to get desensitised. Or desensitising.

Cecily: I’m a little full of malaise.

Delilah: Of all people I recognise the murky seriousness of malaise.

Cecily: I sipped from an intelligent goblet of love, which had its own agency, and when it exercised its agency I became angry and sick with it, and tossed it to the floor. But it didn’t roll far enough away. I had photos of it in my apartment.

Delilah: Hell hath no metaphors like a vampiric poet starved of pennilessness.