It’s half past seven in the morning. The cobblestones shift direction every fifty meters or so. Around him, it has always been a maze. When I arrive, the café is already open, but I choose to wait outside.

I want to watch the air ripple. To stand there and wait for the moment when it reaches my clothes and brushes against me. I don’t know which direction he’ll come from. I hope from the right. The street to the left is too short. The whole thing wouldn’t last even ten seconds.

He comes from the right.

Carried on the waves of last night, happy in a way I rarely see him. The rippling air washes fragments of our story ashore. And the texts I’ve read from him rise up and walk into the café with us. It’s a relief that the place is empty, I think, as he orders breakfast in a voice that sounds like he’s about to begin a reading.

At least the eggs will taste like poetry.

I listen as he tells me about his night. Who was there, who he spoke to, what they talked about. How he felt, I can tell from the way he’s breathing today.

Then we exchange the books we brought, and even though we only have a few minutes left, his words take me to places I rarely allow myself to admit exist within me. Just like in those fragments of our story. The entire spectrum of madness, compressed into record time. Contained.

We even manage to sway a little. In the suspended quiet where our sentences sometimes come to rest. We linger there, lazily, waiting for the next tremor.

I have him calculated.

From experience, I know I can last exactly until our 9:00 a.m. goodbye. But today he wants to walk me part of the way. We make it as far as the statue of a woman made entirely of letters. She sits on the small roof above the entrance, one leg extended, the other bent, her weight resting quietly on her left arm.

In my world, he made her.

But I don’t have time to tell him. My body is already shouting at me to go. One more minute and it will all come back. The whole spectrum.

The final embrace lasts exactly fifty-five seconds.

In the remaining five, I am born again.

Into the sadness of knowing that today, I can do it.