March 10, 2020

The thing I like best in the world is a midnight dinner. It’s even better if the dinner is unexpected. Like when NANA would come into my room and wake me up in the middle of a late summer night and shoe me in the small rustic kitchen. Two big cups of creamy and dark hot chocolate waiting for us on the turquoise wooden table. “For the nightmares my dear Eve, I could hear you crying from the other side of the wall.” It would be even better if outside it was raining.

Nana.

We would sit down and drink our chocolate. Nana would ask me to grab the deck of cards and she would serve me the first round of Gin Rummy. Outside, the cicadas would be buzzing solemnly in the thick brown and green pinewood forest. For every hand, Nana would write down the score and take a sip. Sometimes, when I played exceptionally well, she would look at me through her glasses for a moment too long, remarking how NONO would have been proud to see me play in such a way. Looking back, I wonder if it was really me who suffered from nightmares.

Every hand a sip. Every sip a hand. When I would look through the kitchen window, it seemed like the world didn’t exist. As if the universe was made out of Nana, and me, and the two cups of hot chocolate and the set of French cards.

“You know, Eve,” Nana would say, eyes down looking through the glasses that sat on the tip of her nose, jotting down the result of the game on a notepad. “As I kid I always thought that to love meant to love somebody. But nowadays, I am not sure anymore,” she would say turning the notepad my way so I could double check the score.

“What do you mean Nana?”

Midnight dinners.

When I think of them I can’t help but think of THOM WALTZ. Of his brown eyes, big and dark. Of his face, tanned and handsome, framed by a smile that reminded me of my childhood more than anything else. Of the sun tickling my nose as I laid reading in the shade under my garden’s tree.

Life is strange, don’t you think? We meet thousands of people during our lifetime but only for a very few does our heart truly skip a beat. Thom was one of those persons. And all he needed to do was offer me a glass of wine. From one balcony to the next.

It was my second night in London, two days before university began. I had spent the whole day unpacking boxes with MEGAN. The small truck from Paris, holding all of our possessions, had arrived early in the morning, unloading item after item in front of the pied-a-terre my father had owned since the 80s. A small place tucked in a cobbled mews in South Kensington.

It was night by the time Megan and I finished moving in. Exhausted, we laid against the white walls of the flat catching our breath. An open bottle of white wine in-between us, two empty glasses resting on the dark parquet flooring next to an open pizza box. Our bones aching from the tiresome day. Outside the sun had just started to set. The voices of hundreds of people enjoying one last drink before the weekend came to an end trickled in.

“Do you want to go out?” Megan asked. She brushed off a bead of sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand.

“Is there something happening?”

“A few friends are welcoming freshers from Paris to London tonight,” she explained. Her mouth full of chewy dough.

I don’t know what prompted me to say yes, I was tired and wanted to sleep, my eyes heavy from the day’s effort, but, looking back, I am glad that I did. It’s weird the way our mind works when faced with the unknown. There’s something about moving to a new city, away from those close to you, that allows you to reinvent yourself, to take decisions and act in away that you’d otherwise wouldn’t. You somehow feed off a new energy, trying to desperately align yourself to the wavelengths of those now around you. I guess that is what life is all about, aligning to others.

We had gotten up in silence and prepared to go out. Excited about the night ahead, we stopped at a convenience store to buy a bottle of wine to bring to a party a friend of Megan’s was throwing.

“So whose house is it?” I asked.

“Jean. Tall. Blonde. Good looking. His father is a banker of some-sort. A bit of a prick. But you know: as long as you are one of the group… He’s decent, if you catch what I’m saying. Do you know him?” she said.

My stomach closed. My breath became short and it fell like the .

“I don’t,” I lied.