The Baby He Always Was

Nabokov’s prose is richly layered and ornamental, but never sloppy. Think of baroque architecture: ornate, complex, but exquisitely ordered. This is a modern take on his work.

I.

The prelude, soft—a sonata of silk,

Each note dampened, like a glove on a scream.

He speaks with the polish of polished men,

His vowels carved fine as bone-China rims.

Yet beneath—the tremor, the stain, the slit—

A twitch at the corner of practiced wit.

He plays the part of prey, of grace undone,

By a girl too young, and a look too long.

II.

He crafts her from ribbon, from glance, from myth,

A confection shaped to fit his breath.

She—who once tied her shoes in double knots—

Becomes Delilah in a denim skirt.

“A Lolita,” he sighs, half-wrung with ache,

At a bus stop slick with adolescent rain.

He names Nabokov like a saint’s regret,

As if literature might absolve the debt.

III.

Do not mistake those tears for grief—

They are not water drawn from guilt.

They are the sap of self-preservation,

Leaking from a wound he dares not name.

He is not broken by what he has done,

But by the fear of what is seen.

The mirror has cracked. The myth exposed.

The girl grew up. The story closed.

IV.

You see, they never love the girl—

Not the mosquito-bitten knees,

Not the chipped green polish,

Not the molting brain inventing god.

They love the spell: the before of her,

The chrysalis just before the wings.

And when the butterfly dares to fly,

They curse the air for letting her go.

V.

Humbert, you see, understood this,

Though he swaddled it in rhyme.

He adored Dolores—he said—but oh,

Only when Dolores stood very still.

She was never meant to grow or choose,

Only to blink, to pout, to bruise.

And when she married Dick Schiller—imagine!—

He called it tragedy, not release.

VI.

This teacher, this echo,

This postmodern predator in corduroy,

Spins his own novella of velvet sin.

“She looked at me,” he says, lips damp.

Her gaze, to him, was proof of crime,

A summons, not a child’s unknowing.

He calls it fate. He calls it wronged.

He calls it love, when it was long gone.

VII.

He mourns not her—oh no—but himself,

The him that was untouched, untold, untried.

Now she grows, and in her growth,

His delusion shatters like sugared glass.

Her voice deepens. Her thoughts get sharp.

She stops shrinking to make him tall.

She does not blush at his dull jokes.

She sees him. Whole. And does not flinch.

VIII.

She was not his to sculpt or frame.

Not his pastel, not his private flame.

She was becoming—how obscene—

Something beyond his fevered dream.

Her body changed. Her mind outpaced.

She left the stage. She changed the pace.

She walked into her name, her skin,

While he remained where he’d always been.

IX.

A baby, in truth—pale and soft.

Pouting in the ruins of a ruined plot.

He roared like lion, scratched like fox,

But every claw was paper, every tooth a prop.

The performance was all. The mask, divine.

But oh, the panic when it slipped.

A man exposed is not profound—

Just frightened, small, and tightly wound.

X.

He cries now not for what is lost,

But for what cannot be restored.

The girl—grown—refuses the script.

She exits. And the spotlight turns.

He is alone, and every room echoes.

She is not there to catch his fall.

She does not die. She does not pine.

She simply lives—and that is all.

XI.

The tragedy is not hers.

She will scar, and she will heal.

But he—he calcifies in myth,

Preserved in the amber of arrested growth.

No new self. No turning page.

Only the tantrum of a thwarted age.

The baby he always was,

Swaddled in stories no one buys.

XII.

He says he loved her. He did not.

He loved the hold, the hush, the hush.

He loved that she could not yet leave.

Until she did.

She grew.

He didn’t.

And that is the end.