When I first met you I was seduced by your French accent and your Mediterranean grace— you never hid the curves of your countryside behind the folds of an inscrutable veil. You reclined on tasseled pillows and whispered your secrets to me with lips that had the fragrance of freshly brewed mint tea. The first time you were raped I comforted you. I bundled you in embroidered maps that contained the wounded flesh of your cartography. I wiped your blood with the pages of my unused prayer book. I held you through the endless evenings as the bombs exploded in your nightmares. There was second time and then a third. I became suspicious of how easily others invaded you. You started to look to me like a beggar in the town square who always had fresh tears and a stale story for the tourists who gathered at lunch. You cried my name across a boulevard of smoldering rubble and I looked back at you and tossed two coins in your cup. Now you find yourself once again covered in torn embroidery, an atlas of undressed wounds that no tailor will come to suture. You face the evening alone on a cushion of scattered tea leaves as I crawl across minefields and the fragments of your shattered samovar to kneel once again at your bedside and beg for a sign of your forgiveness, a gesture under that shroud of blood and paper— the pages ripped from your history.