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Episodes of life

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My phone rings, showing an “unknown” number. I pick up and recognize the voice. He is in Paris and wants to see me. I accept it without hesitation. I decide to leave work earlier than usual. I open my drawer and pick my makeup bag. While I put on my mascara, making sure my eyelashes do not stick to one another, I imagine how our conversation will go. This is the first time I hear from him in five years.

On my way to our “rendez-vous”, I enter into a store and buy a new shirt. For the sake of old times, I have decided to be a bit sexy, while staying casual. I ask the sales person to keep my old shirt in her store, I will take it tomorrow. After half an hour of running up and down in the metro stations, I arrive to the meeting place. Like all the guys that I’ve known, he is late. I sit in a café and wait. I finally see him coming from far. I pay my drink and join him. He chooses another café that is not “too dark” nor “too empty”, and has an original decoration. This is why I liked him, he had taste. I sit across him and order a nice Bordeaux. While I sip on my wine, I look at him. He looks a bit tired, but in good shape. I notice tiny wrinkles around his eyes. Tiny wrinkles that remind the passage of life.

I remember the first time we met. We were in our early twenties, in a different space and time. We were sitting in a coffee shop across each other, talking about our dreams. At that time I was finishing up my masters and getting ready to go to the US and he was looking for a job. Life was full of unknowns and we were ready to jump into the adventure. That was almost fifteen years ago.

His smile cuts the thread of my wanderings in the past. He asks me about my life. Apparently he knows everything about me by reading my blog; my whereabouts, my friends, my trips. I have nothing to add except my work related problems. He laughs and tells me that I should be happy that I have a job. Then he picks up his wallet and shows me the picture of a cute little girl; his daughter. I stare at her and recognize her father in her playful black eyes. She looks exactly how I always imagined his kid would be …

Hours pass and we talk without stopping, as if we want to erase the five years that have separated us. But somehow, things have changed. Somehow I don’t feel the need to tell him about the details of my life, like I used to. Once we learn to keep things for ourself, the need for sharing fades away. To me he is a different person with traces of someone I used to know. It is difficult to imagine that once I used to talk to him for hours every day. It is difficult to imagine that once I could not see life without him, and yet it happened and I got used to it.

We finish our Parisian “apéro” and I kiss him goodbye, wishing him a good trip back. And so, another episode came to an end.