The 75 Cent Bread

I was in bed.

Not sleeping. Just in bed the way you are when the world has asked too much of you in too short a time and your body decides that horizontal is the only reasonable response. I had found an airbnb in Aubervilliers, northern Paris, far enough from the centre that it felt like a different city. Concrete and quiet and nobody knew me there. I had the curtains drawn.

He messaged and told me to meet him on the street. I came out the gate and there he was, standing in the middle of the road looking for some clue of which house I was in. Just a man in a street in Aubervilliers, squinting at buildings, entirely unbothered by how this looked.

He didn't ask if I was okay. He said the situation was sad and then he said he needed to go to the store and told me to grab my things.

This is a specific kind of care. Not the kind that sits with you and asks you to talk through it. The kind that gets you vertical and moving before you've had time to decide you don't want to be. I got up. I grabbed my things. We went to the store.

I reached for the 25 cent bread because I was in survival mode, doing the math the way you do when you're counting what you have left and trying to make it stretch. He took it out of my hand and put it back. The 75 cent bread, he said. It keeps longer and tastes better and right now you need good food.

Fifty cents. The difference was fifty cents.

It sounds like nothing. It was not nothing. It was the difference between someone seeing that I was managing and someone seeing that I deserved better than managing. Those are not the same thing and most people, even kind people, don't catch the distinction.

We walked to a concrete park near the store. Not a pretty park. The kind of park that exists because a neighbourhood needed somewhere to put a bench. We had coffee and we walked and we talked the way two people talk when they have both been somewhere difficult and don't need to explain the geography of it to each other. There was a knowing between us that didn't require words. Just the walk and the coffee and the ordinary afternoon doing its quiet work.

By the time we got back I could think again.

I don't know what I would have done without that afternoon. Probably stayed in bed longer than was good for me. Probably eaten the 25 cent bread.

Some people find you exactly when you need to be found.

They don't make a production of it. They just show up and say they need to go to the store and hand you your coat.

Jackie