Second

We deserve one last summer before the world ends.

Don't think about how dizzily the walls are bending and hijacking your pupils. How your spine crunches with every movement. That hawk of a waiter. Listen to the same two songs over and over in the middle of rainy Paris and drink coffee and wish you had a smoke like the vapidly affectionate couples on either side of you. Think about how you only have five more nights in this place. Don't look at them. They're unhappy you swear to god. Your friends are coming soon. Soon you'll have company.

Delicacy. Everywhere you go there are lovers waiting for their lovers to return from transatlantic voyages, work, the bathroom. That look of serenity on their faces, knowing she'll be back flouncing in her miniskirt and stilettos and beret, raring to go. Take her back to your flat and fuck her but jesus, stop staring at me.

Nothing like sitting outside listening to Visions of Johanna while your stomach churns from that café au lait. And a man in a baseball cap stares from beyond the glass at their two obscene bodies rippling underneath their clothes and blocks the sidewalk. She bends over and kisses her man, doesn't let him get up, stalls. Licks her lips. Sits on his lap. And you're thinking of how you'd like to try out a French lover someday because even on the street, men kiss their women like nothing you've ever had. They slip arms around peacoats and huddle around two tiny cups of coffee and an ashtray.

You relocate two doors down to a crêperie where your green face shrieks against the yellow wallpaper as though somebody had vomited there. A tumorous decrepit mutt stumbles around and nestles at the customers' feet. Barks. The only person who feeds him is an old woman, a fixture in fur hat and collar. She gives him bits of galette off her fork, which he accepts daintily before falling asleep.

But this is good and necessary. This kind of existential feeling, when you are inundated by city and by that sense of yourself that howls so painfully and peculiarly in strange places. It blasts your ears with noise: there are five days like there are five years. There is an airplane coming for you that won't splinter or crack. That it's just the caffeine and tobacco swirling around in your arteries. That it is claiming this downpour and emptying this city.