Paris

Taking shelter outside the cafe after walking the river Seine two days in a row/excited about the general smoke in the air and the fact that I won’t be chastised for smoking a cigarette/the streets not quite ancient but old enough for stories are patch-worked together by rivers, perfectly cubed rustic buildings/ thousand-year-old churches and the silent aftermath of war/you can really only see the delicate calculation of the structures when you look from above/ the sun peeks out from the clouds every once in awhile/ light rain coats my hair the waiter pats me on the head with his smile when I try to greet him in French, I realize three days later that I’ve been greeting people with “good evening” all day/ a guitar player sings La Vie En Rose and it is as if all of the pieces of a puzzle have found their way to each other so that I can be here, in a perfect moment, above the river at kilometer zero, the center of their world.