French Pastries

by Ellen O’Connell

The last time I saw you it was summer in California and we sat at the French café for old time’s sake.  I deconstructed the pastry flakes of a pain au chocolat while you reinvented the art of attacking a mille feuille.  Under the table our knees bumped but you didn’t move yours away. 

During the summer we spent together I thought my hand would be in yours forever, and one night we caught the last BART back to San Francisco.  We had gone to a party in Berkeley, initially assessing that we knew no one very well, easing our awkwardness by drinking too much sangria.  By the time we realized we did know some partygoers, we were too sloppy to make much of an impression.   A girl at the party asked if we were going to get married. 

“That’s an awkward question,” you replied, puffing away at an uncharacteristic cigarette, which you only did when you’d had too much to drink.  I leaned against your legs on some concrete college dorm stairs, hoping we really would get married someday.  

When we walked home from the Civic Center that night, the stars unbuttoned over our heads to let us see the heavens we believed were up there.  You offered to give me a piggyback ride.  When I said no, you pulled me close and whispered to the top of my head.

“I love being out with you late at night. Don’t you feel like it’s you and me against the world?”

“Yes,” I said back.  “I always do.”  

We breathed the air of the same city and were drunk off the same sangria, and I wanted nothing more than to get home and feel my bare skin against yours.  

More than a year later, you call me at my apartment in Brooklyn while I am holding a dinner party and you are living in London for the year.  Two years have passed since I first saw you in a street near the Louvre, and it has already been a year since you told me, in the thick fog of the Appalachian Mountains, that you don’t want our skin to touch anymore.  

“I want to move to New York next year,” you tell me on the phone.

“I never thought you’d say that.” I stir lentils in an apartment full of guests.  

“We can sample French pastries together.”

“We’ll always have Paris.”  I add the onion.

I drop in a bay leaf and my friends in the kitchen talk and laugh without me.  “Get off the phone,” they mouth to me.  I point to the phone and mouth your name back so they know who is keeping me from them.

“I really miss you.”  Your voice quiets to a near whisper.

“There are so many times I want to call you but can’t,” I say.  “But I guess that’s what comes from living so far apart.”

The lentils are nearly done.  You were the one who taught me to make them, but mine are different.  Mine taste better, somehow.

“I have to go now,” I tell you.

“I’m sorry I kept you,” you say.