Made a list tonight of places I want to eat before I die. Got through two and then stopped because the two felt complete somehow, like they said everything the list was trying to say.
Breakfast at Takada Castle Site Park during cherry blossom season.
Dinner in Paris. By the Eiffel Tower. Actually by it, close enough that you have to tip your head back to see the top.
I keep thinking about why those two specifically. They’re complete opposites, and I think that’s exactly it.
Takada is quiet. It’s the kind of beautiful that doesn’t announce itself. You have to show up at the right time of year, in the right light, and just sit with it. The cherry blossoms don’t last. That’s the whole point. You’re eating breakfast under something that will be gone in two weeks, and the brevity is what makes it matter. It’s beauty that asks nothing of you except to be present while it’s still there.
The Eiffel Tower is the opposite of that. It’s been there for over a hundred years, and it’ll be there for a hundred more. It’s loud and bold and completely unapologetic about existing. Half the world has seen it. The other half wants to. There’s nothing quiet or temporary about it. It just stands there saying ‘look at me,’ and the whole city agrees.
I want both.
I want the breakfast that knows it’s ending and the dinner that knows it isn’t.
The whisper and the shout.
The thing that’s beautiful because it won’t last and the thing that’s beautiful because it will.
That’s not too much to ask right?
Well, if it is, I’ll just make it impossible by wanting them both…on the same day.
I read it twice. Three times.
I’ll just make it impossible by wanting them both…on the same day.
She’s joking. I can hear it—the self-deprecating tilt of it, the way she laughs at her own wanting because wanting too much is easier to carry if you make it absurd first.
I know that feeling.
I’ve been making things impossible on purpose my whole life. Wanting things I had no right to want and then burying them so deep they stopped feeling like wants and started feeling like just the shape of the hole where something should have been.
She does it with cherry blossoms and Paris.
I do it with her.
We’re the same kind of ruined by wanting things that are out of reach—just in completely different languages.
We’re the same kind of…something, even if it’s in the impossible.
A metallic jingle breaks the silence. The scrape of her key finding the lock. I know that sound, I’ve heard it from the street below a hundred times. And then the click of the deadbolt turning.
I’m on my feet and the diary goes back in one motion—pen, elastic, face up, exact—and I’m across the room in four silent steps, into the wardrobe, pulling the door to within an inch of closed before her front door opens.
I control my breathing. Slow it. Make it nothing.
Through the gap, I can see the bedroom doorway and the edge of the hallway beyond it. I hear her drop her bag, the sound of it hitting the floor. She never sets it down, always drops it, like it takes the weight of the day with it. I hear the keys landing on the entry table, one shoe being kicked off, then the other, the soft double thud of them.
She moves through the apartment the way she always does. Unhurried. Like the space expands to receive her.
I hear the fridge open. Close. The tap running briefly. Then her footsteps coming down the hall, and I go absolutely still—the kind of still I learned in rooms I don’t name anymore. The kind that lives in muscle memory now, the kind that has kept me alive more times than I can count.
She comes into the bedroom, doesn’t turn the overhead light on. Just the lamp on the nightstand, and the room becomes something else entirely. Something private and lit from within, and I’m standing in her wardrobe in the dark watching her move through it and I can’t look away.
She reaches back and pulls the tie from her hair without thinking. All of it falls, layers and curls of gold I’ve only ever seen from a distance, falling loose around her shoulders, and she shakes it out once, a single small, unconscious gesture, and I feel it somewhere behind my sternum like a key turning in a lock I didn’t know was there.
She rolls her neck slowly, a fluid half-circle that releases tension in small increments, and I can almost hear the soft crack of vertebrae realigning. Her fingertips find the hem of her sweater—pale blue cashmere.
