04h15 sweat stripe

some days, the blue sky over Paris wakes already promising something. Juliette is never in a hurry — never — but walks as if she knows exactly where she's going. it's noon, and the sun clings to the stones, the city breathes in its irregular but magical rhythm, and she seems apart from it all, on a frequency of her own. she loves passing by the bookstalls and old trinkets that once had other owners and have seen other centuries, waves at someone with a smile that never fully forms, and moves on. there’s something in the way she holds her fresh bouquet that makes her impossible to ignore. she’s not waiting for anyone, but she’s thinking of someone. she sits near the Seine river, where the wind insists on playing with her loose hair. breaks off the tip of her crusty baguette, still warm from when she bought it earlier that morning. she always chooses La Parisienne bakery, in the 10th arrondissement. her favourite. as she savours it, she gazes at the horizon. no one knows exactly where to, maybe somewhere else in the world, maybe just inward. she closes her eyes, and for a moment, seems to be speaking with an absence. and then, without asking permission, those thoughts arrive — never in a rush, but never missing a meeting _is the sea still as cold as it used to be in april? does he remember how the wind used to dance there, between the dunes and the pines? does he also talk to the stars about me? or is he just living, as if I were only a memory inhabiting a place that no longer hurts? she doesn’t quite know where he is. but sometimes it feels like a soft light crosses the whole continent, along the Atlantic Ocean, just to touch the tip of her fingers. as if, somewhere tucked away in the south, someone whispered her name without ever saying it out loud. she opens her eyes slowly, the city carries on, unbothered, but in her, everything is suddenly clearer. there are silences that answer more than a thousand words.