Snippets

His thigh is heavy as it has migrated to the bend of my knee, and an arm sinks limply over my waist. I am Toto, the stuffed bear from his childhood.
He breathes inconsistently, one minute through his mouth, blowing a short passage of air into the nape of my neck; and suddenly, with a hiss like a leaky gas pipe and a short gasp, the tunnels change and he exhales through his nose, down my back.

It can't last, and we both know this, but with my eyes wide open, our legs intertwined, and as he is clutching me like Toto the bear, we will take what we can get. With the back of his hands brushing the hem of soft pink chiffon, I feel very eerily like I am on an airplane, seatbelt cinched at my waist, watching the turbulence light flicker.

In two hours, the sun will rise, and I will have both feet once again planted on solid ground.

C'est tout, bébé. We both know this was a one way ticket.

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She stands over the kitchen counter, delicately and lovingly slicing pears. She takes her toasted bread out of the oven, spreads Nutella over them, and lays each sliver of pear across the slices of bread. She glances at the clock.

In the last forty minutes, she has woken up (beating her alarm clock by 13 minutes), lay in bed in deliberation, taken a shower, gotten dressed, and is now eating her breakfast over the kitchen sink. In the next twenty minutes, she will brush her teeth, fix her make-up, zip her luggage bag, and roll it out the door, realizing, two minutes after ensuring all the locks, that she has left dirty dishes in the sink. She does not turn back.

When she is safely on the bus, she takes out a book and flips it to the first page. "I Wish Someone Were Waiting For Me Somewhere". This is an unusual selection for her - it's a recently release book, for one thing, and the title tells nearly nothing about the plotline. Perhaps she chose it because one week prior, she was in the area of Saint-Germain-des-Pres, the very location where the book begins. Or maybe because Vogue (a magazine she frequently leafs through) has hailed the author as a "distant descendant to Dorothy Parker" (a poet she frequently enjoys).
However, most likely of all, it may just be because she wants more than anything to find out how the story ends.

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Hello, mes cheres. I'm back, and boy, am I ever in the deep now.