vibrations

Mahmoud Darwish

At a bread shop, on the corner of a narrow Paris street, I sip my first coffee. The smell of bread mixes with the smell of coffee in the mornings, awakening in me the desire for a fresh life, a life just beginning, and a spontaneous peace with small things, and with pigeons who prefer strutting around among cars and passers-by to flying. I don't see anyone else sitting there with only his journals for company, but I feel I am sharing in the elderly ladies' enthusiasm for the detailed information they are relating about other people's lives, and the politely neutral responses of the pretty shop assistants and waitresses when male customers older than me flirt with them. I linger over my coffee to preserve an acquired sense of companionship with my surroundings, for a stranger has no alternative but to construct some kind of intimacy with some random place, and I have chosen this corner of the bread shop to form a daily routine, as if I have an appointment with hardworking memories that rely on themselves to grow and evolve. I abandon myself to thoughts about the history of bread: how was the first grain of wheat discovered in a green ear braided like a pigtail? And how did someone observe it ripening and turning golden? And how did it occur to him to grind it, knead it and bake it until he arrived at this miracle? I see fields far away in time and place and wonder how long this act of creation took. The smell of fresh bread rises into the air and I look at my watch, then come back from thousands of years away to a life just beginning.