Saturday, March 24, 2007

Dilettante

Maybe it’s because I’m here with Z—cocooned in layers of affection, far away from real-life frustrations like the 82 annotated bibliographies that will be waiting for me when I get home—but it is so much easier to enjoy the small things in this city. Like for instance, I helped Z pick out table service for four at the thrift shop and we were both quite pleased with how much six dollars will buy when you aren’t at Macy’s. Buying a newspaper seems like an event. At home I would drive around a parking lot six times looking for the spot closest to the front door, but here I think nothing of walking twelve (or twenty) blocks to get a cup of hot chocolate.

Today I can feel sadness trying to lap at my shores, but I’m not having it. I’m not wasting one day with Z because I’m sad that I don’t get more time with him when the time I have had has been so delicious. I’ll be sad tomorrow and I won’t be able to keep the tide at bay, but today I. WILL. NOT. GIVE. IN.

It’s a nothing of a day. We get out of bed late, we eat breakfast late, we wander around a grocery buying nothing in particular, we stop in another bookshop that I wish I would have discovered earlier. Eventually we end up at Dilettante, a little wine bar of place that sells chocolate instead of vino. It is decorated in dark, chocolaty colors and I’m instantly sure that this is the place I wanted to come five minutes after Chocolat was over the first time I saw it. We both have versions of hot chocolate—Z’s is sweeter than mine, both come with cups of teeny chocolate chips. Surely nothing ever tastes this good at home.

No, it might, but at home I would be in such hurry to get to my next thing that I’d never enjoy licking the cream off of my lip or listening to the hushed conversations that are taking place around us. Instead, I’d go zip-bang from my hot chocolate to whatever was waiting for me next. I want to stay here, drinking chocolate and sitting with Z, forever, pretending this is my place of habitation, but knowing if it were, I wouldn’t be enjoying the simple things half so much.

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