Lumpy Takes France!

|| Tuesday, May 15, 2007 ||

Sweets.

Droit Pénal today. Finally free. Joy alas tempered by strange sense of loss. So it really is over. It really has been over for quite awhile, but until that last exam, I still could claim to be an exchange student. Now, I am officially on holiday. Exchange is over.

And from this moment forth, one hour passed is one hour less. Ah! Parting is such sweet sorrow! Sorrow I understand, but from whence the sweetness?

On a happier note, I will be off to Barcelona tomorrow. Barcelona, Sevilla and Granada. Sun, food and fun. And hopefully new clothes. They tell me Zara is ridiculously cheap in Spain. Well whatever it is I want my dress. I have decided to get a pretty dress and I will get it. What I like a lot about myself is my persistance: my mind once set cannot be altered, as my heart once fixed will not waver and as my soul once ironed will not be bent.

***

A sweet lies upon my shelf. My French boys gave it to me. It had a fratenal twin which I have eaten. This one though, I strangely cannot bear to.

It is not the nicest of sweets - far from it. I was assured that I had been given the best two flavours - orange and green (whatever flavour green represents). I tried orange, cause I like saving my favourite for the last. Delayed gratification has always been my style. No particular flavour, acidic centre which was too sour... it is the kind of sweet I would never have touched back home. Yet here... to precious to swallow.

This sweet, this silly little green sweet somehow manages to encapsulate an era: lectures in school; french greetings and how I never do make that kissing sound though everyone else does; the sparkling, the smokey and the socialist; photocopying and cards I always lose; tutorials rushed out Monday nights; walking with the winter cold on my cheek; Sundays and the bakery; darkness which falls too early in the evening; praliné croustillant chocolat noir; that bright sun, soft silky bright sun; groceries; a room with a blue bed on one end, and a working desk on the other and a sleek black head at either one end or the other.

Once the sweet is gone... not the ideal sweet, not my favourite sweet, but once it is gone...

Foolish sentiment.

And in the ultimate indulgence of foolish sentiment, I plan to eat that sweet the same day I leave town. So it will be no longer. The sweet was never meant to last forever.

But until then, a sweet will continue lying on my shelf, given to me by my French boys; pristine, unwrapped and full of sweet promise.