baby in a ridiculous green hat watches me from his fathers shoulders. i smile at him. he smiles back. i have more teeth. his father does not see us, we are secret friends.
a man sits across from me on the square. he is a little bit older than my father and has a large stomach slung low in his blue shirt. he looks lonely, impossibly lonely, and i wonder if my father ever looks like this on park benches in the beautiful cities to which he travels by himself. i would suffer a thousand deaths to make that not be so, two thousand deaths.
black jacketed man with black hair and grey temples carries an impossibly proportioned bag of foam padding. it is twice his thickness, eight times his width, a fifth his height.
toddler with two toy trucks, one for each triumphant fist. he smashes them together over his head. dark lashes. his mother is missing a tooth, wears a red coat.
two really little boys play on the square while their big black nanny takes a rest. she's got another one sleeping in the pram and her arm slung over the back of the bench. the two little guys are ecstatic. they look at me and start yelling happily, jumping up on the bench and prancing around. i wave at them. they wave back and start doing tricks for me. they perform various feats on the bench until their nanny drags them off again. they prance after her, jubilant and awkward.
hanna and i have dinner at hers and it's cold walking home-- west towards barbès-rochechoaurt. the moon is a hole of light shot into the black sky. it bounces some sunlight onto facing contrails. night planes
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