As it occurs to me

This I wrote after eating French macaroons in a pastry shop in Yorkville. I looked on with something like sadness while the friendly young woman behind the counter tie-up a box of sweets for the distracted cutie on his blackberry ignorant to her attempts to engage him.

Govert Grapjurk by Erik Suidman

He had been to her little pastry shop before in a way often but not regular, always without words and ordering with regularity a variation on the same theme; an espresso with some savoury something or the other. She was trying to sort him out in between the rush of orders, never bothering to learn his name, referring to him only as the worn Clint Eastwood with the hard sad eyes. Until the week she had gone off on whimsy to her parents in Montréal and he had turned up at their pastry shop near Saint-Laurent and Mont-Royal to tell her it hadn’t been the same without her there.

“Without you it had been no more than the four seasons and I rest my bags then tipped the man at the door. There was no smile or sweet cinnamon and I had been weary traveller.”

She should have been alarmed at his presence but she was no more than thoughtful rising with arms open and he had been reluctant despite having come so far, for theirs had been no more than her kind smiles behind the counter. It struck him them how unlike warmth her embrace had been to him there coiled around her soft giving frame feeling raw as if peeled and drenched in salt. Her words at his ears, “Have you eaten?” as her hands run over his back playing at comfort and familiarity.

He took breath in a sort of relief then said, “I don’t like sweets.”

My love my care,

Simone