Julienne, a Danish-French fashion designer, sits in a Parisian café with her ex-mother-in-law.

The café, wooden-paneled and plaster, invites whispers of light flittering about between herself and aged window panes, illuminating the speckles of dust slowly moving downward in air. Some speckles fall to the brick floor and will be swept up in time. Others begin to dance with currents, and move back upwards, continually in motion. Continually dynamic.

The meal concluded five minutes ago, so she reaches for a cigarette. Her elongated fingers are cut deeply on the finger tips from maneuvering a new fabric made from the pulp of discarded vegetables. She had been at it for three days, working waste into functional beauty, to discover, unexpectedly, that she was not enjoying the process at all.

She worked up until arriving this morning, on a whim, to embrace her history in a new way in physicality, and to let her hands heal from numbing obsession. The light of the occasional cigarette and the lathering of gentle oils into her worn hands in her quaint hotel room of five square meters off Rue de Amelié was all the work she would take these next three days.

It’s been a year since Troels and she decided to part ways. But the one part of endings, is that it doesn’t.

When faced with the pure fact that we are still longing for the moments of engaging connection with anyone who moved us, we continue to tell ourselves there still exists some remnant of time registered within our daily breathing and witnessing. Sometimes we tell ourselves this to believe it all mattered.

Her ex-mother-in-law is talking about her latest holiday to the Canary Islands, a typical routine for depressed and aging Scandinavians. They flock there like birds to sunbath on rocks and soak in the vitamin D they refuse to take in their daily spoonfuls of cod liver oil.

Julienne does not hear her after ten minutes, and instead, begins to notice a man sitting two tables away who has not stopped looking at her since she sat down. His gaze has become more direct with each passing minute. She notices red velvet, framing his position, like the entry into a painting.

She takes another drag and moves back to the conversation which has now turned to commentary on the difference between paella on the islands and the mainland. This is far more interesting to listen to but it’s not enough to block out the gaze. The mother-in-law’s voice blurs out, and every other aural point magnifies. She could hear a pin drop.

“What have you been up to these past six months?” mother-in-law asks.

Julienne snaps to.

There is a split second where she entertains telling mother-in-law the reality. At this moment, if she so choses, she will either alienate the woman and their relationship will fade fast into memory, or if she choses an easy response, they will continue to have encounters like this that are near-meaningless.

Julienne takes another look at the man. He’s still present. She begins to get hot.

“Oh, just some tests on new fabrics,” she answers.

“Anything exotic?” the mother-in-law asks.

“You could say so. Yes,” Julienne replies. “I am looking at some new colors, new designs, some patterns that could be next year’s hit.”

“Oh,” the mother-in-law replies. “I miss getting your swatches. You know I made a small blanket of the last batch you had sent me. Before you and Troels parted ways. It was a gift for his niece who just arrived two months ago. You wouldn’t know about her though, would you?”

“No. I had no idea Nanna was even expecting,” Julienne answers.

Look to the man. The eyes. The gaze. Can he take her out of this now? If so, she’d go.

“Of course. What was I thinking,” mother-in-law replies.

She pauses. Her eyes begin to look wet.

“I have missed you, Julienne. So very much,” she continues. “I hope the world is treating you well.”

“Oh yes. I have been okay,” Julienne says. “I have my work.”

The waitress arrives with dessert. Creme Brulée for the mother-in-law, with tea. A sharp double shot espresso for Julienne.

Julienne looks to the man and he is gone. She feels a spark of panic.

The emotional connection was momentary. There is no way to hold the space. Mother-in-law has begun to look far more intrigued by dessert than delving any deeper into Julienne’s answer. She was never emotionally available when she was needed anyhow. Julienne needs to get up and find the man.

She rises, excusing herself to go to the loo and moves towards the red velvet curtain threshold. And suddenly, he is right in front of her.

In one swift moment, he pulls the curtain around himself and her body and she and the man are swept up into the space between the past and future.

PART TWO

It’s as if time stopped.

Absolutely nothing else in the world matters except exactly everything here.

This material, this fluidness, opening me while closing me, has cradled a portal into a whole state. I can’t describe it. I can only feel it.

Is that velvet red, or am I only imaging it to be so? When my eyes are closed in a deep merge, it no longer matters, but I still see color in darkness. I still feel color in heat.

The texture caresses my arms, my bleeding hands, while his skin does so too in the same frequency. I can’t tell the difference anymore between either as they are merging into oneness while I am merging into oneness with both.

I’ve lost light in this space. Panels of fabric have absorbed us into secrecy and I can no longer grasp my body outside of this enclosure. I hear nothing but his breathing. I hear nothing but my thoughts. I feel nothing but completeness, of something far more vast and far more omnipresent, like an invisible infrastructure that has given us this space. The physicality is temporary as a reminder that our bodies are also, temporary.

Have I met you before somewhere as you taste familiar? Have I embraced you in a past life knowing your scent? I know your scent. I smelled it as you watched me. It is what pulled us both here to this contact point because we had to have a contact point.

Light moves inside our mutable home, and I remember.

And I walk away from the red velvet and him just as quickly as I entered. I make no eye contact with him, nor anyone.

“Where is the toilet,” I think. I can center at the toilet.

I have to get out of here. I have to really get out of here. Not here but the surface here. Did he just give me access?

I head to exterior door and walk outside. The sun is enticing and I need to feel air.

Suddenly, the man grabs my waist.

“Listen,” he says in a British dialect. “You don’t know me… or, we don’t know each other, here, maybe. Or maybe we do.”

I have no response.

“I knew you were here,” he continues. “I met you once before.”

I have no recollection. What the fuck is he talking about.

“Please see me again,” he continues, still.

“What? How?” I reply. “I don’t understand what this is.”

“You don’t need to,” he replies. “I need to see you again.”

“Why?” I ask.

He looks into my eyes deeper than anyone I have ever known. I want to hide from him. He is going in that deep, but I also want to let him have me like this.

He holds out his hand for me to grab, and I do, tightly, like a trust I have never known before in this lifetime. And he leads me away from the café and into the Paris streets.

PART TWO

All at once, we broke one barrier.

If I could count all the times in my life that I stepped into spaces that are unknown, unplanned and unreal that resulted in opening a door into more than I could have imagined, it might be possible to assure you that these are the moments in living most worth embracing. Because it is when I have done just such, despite what my nagging societal conditioning tells me is wrong, scary and even irresponsible, that I have experienced elevating myself to some higher state of consciousness.

These barriers are real and yet they are a completely human-constructed state of control. Perhaps it is so, if you witness and know, you can no longer be controlled by the very system that tells you to be quiet, to pay your taxes on time, to fit into a box of the societal normative. Sometimes the rug that keeps us surely footed gets pulled out from under us, repeatedly. And when that continues, it is obvious, we should throw the rug away.

I want to say that the man and I fell in love and that we lived the happily-ever-after, but we all know that is not real. And that kind of story gives us false hopes that the biggest work of our romantic lives lies in that first encounter, and the subsequent few.

The Parisian streets are in and of themselves, a romance. Much like life, the corridors and reveals can be unexpected. They can offer us secrets and surprises.

I held his hand and followed along, noting the atmosphere, the smells, the sounds, his pace, and did so with complete abandon. We arrived to his boutique hotel not far from the cafe and proceeded to spend the next three days together. I recall nothing but euphoric blur.

The morning after he pulled me from my perceived obsoleteness, I was to catch my flight back to Copenhagen in preparation for a fashion show with my design partner, and yet, I missed the flight. I could not pull myself to go. I rescheduled the flight, apologized profusely for shirking responsibility, and rebooked to arrive back home in the next day.

That night I saw the stars in a completely new way. I realized that they were part of me and that my time here was not isolated from being able to see them, or just as a quiet, passive observer. The Seine sang to me several notes about currents, and I saw time move around me like a neatly constructed envelope.

And then I missed my next flight to engulf myself in what I knew would be the last moment of knowing him.

There are some moments that are so exquisite that they become etched in sensations. The scent of another walking by you, a song finely willowing from some hidden corner, and then, some tastes, like the flesh of a past lover revealed in a new one, take you exactly back to a contact point so impressed in your soul, you remember potent presence.

I finally departed and resumed my life, and upon leaving, he asked for my number and my name. I gave him neither and thanked him for paradise.

ENCOUNTERS OF THE ARCHITECTURAL MOMENTARY