The last day

The street was exploding. This street, the street I have walked every morning while here, with no destination only direction is now, at this early hour, filled with flowers. People setting up stands – long rows of pure summer colors and smells. I stop, not being able t help myself. Here you do not touch. Point and they hold it up. Yes, I want those. Perfect new potatoes with skin as delicate and transparent as a new born. I have no kitchen here, no stove, and no way to cook them. But I get them anyway and slip them into my bag with the large headed sunflowers from my childhood. Heads as big as my own. I’ve always felt like a sunflower. Fringes with color that draws the eye away from the inside. But I you did look, it wouldn’t just be a slick black swirl, but a complicated spiral indicating the trajectory of life.
The chef at the café I’ve been frequenting is beside me.
“What would you fancy for breakfast this morning?” His emphasis on this in his lightly accented English which dances over the display of dusty hued fruit. I reach into my bag and pull out a perfect new potato, round and still wrapped in a light dusting of soil like a receiving blanked protecting its delicate skin. He turns and his green eyes look just like leaves in spring, newly furled and unprotected.
“Perfect.”
A half hour and two cups of tea later, a plate of lemon ricotta pancakes, faces as big as the yellow fringes ones poking out of my bag, arrives with a side of fried new potatoes and some sort of spicy smelling sausage. The chef brought it all himself pointing out all of the ingredients he bought at the market that morning.
“The lemon made me think of your sunshine” He said pointing to my hair and then to the flowers. The pancakes are good. Lemon and ricotta not heavy but rather like the ocean. Smooth waves of flavor complemented by the tea and fruit. The potatoes and spicy sausage do not go with this meal, but he knew I wanted them. The crisp potatoes have a flavor I can’t quite put my finger on. Something like the taste of a warm kiss but more salty. Maybe something of the earth, perhaps they were grown near the ocean. I think of them growing in that dark secret place I have never been and envy the silence they grew up in.
Other people are here now. Drawn, perhaps, by my breakfast. Highlighted so perfectly in the window. I think to myself, “This is my best time. I am the most perfect self I will ever be.” Radian, redolent. Full of summer fruit and love for myself, yet the oily black swirl is still inside. It cannot be drowned out by the brilliant yellow fringe.
Pink Floyd is playing and I think for a moment that it is inside my head.

And all that you are
And all that you miss
And all that you love
And all that you kiss

Those are probably not the words, but that is what I hear along with the "ahhh" of the back up singers raising like mist off of pine trees. It is not in my head, but all around us. Voices lifted over our breakfasts. Each of us eating, consumed as we consume and now pressed by the weight of the just-too-loud music out lives and the future near and empty plate, far an empty life.
Anyone who knows me and read this will wonder – really? Pink Floyd? Yes. It is one of those surreal moments. The ones you look back on and think “Ah, it was then that the direction changed.”