The Tourist

She should have been sitting there next to me, in the cold iron chair, sipping champagne and eating fresh bread, smelling like a rose and complaining about the wait for our food. It always was her dream to be here in France, ever since she was merely a child.

I sipped on my red wine and gazed at the cloudy blue sky. I could hear the faint sound of Frenchmen laughing and having a lighthearted conversation below. I had taken French lessons, but I only understood bits and pieces of what they were saying, my memory faded with age. The children would exclaim in the same tongue, understanding everything another would say while I sat there, simply enjoying the foreign sounds and view from a great height.

She always seemed much more passionate about the language than I was. She'd speak in French and I would listen to it only because it meant that I could gaze at her lips. I would hear the way her lilted voice drawled out specific vowels and consonants, and I only knew what words were mispronounced because she would scold herself about it constantly. The only words that are prominent in my memory are the ones she frequently mistook for another or would say incorrectly.

I would give anything to have her sitting in that chair, telling the waitress what to get us and laughing when she heard a joke from a nearby couple, having a chat over dinner. I would give anything just to see her eyes light up when she saw the Eiffel Tower in person for the first time, or would smile to herself as we held hands along the Champs-Élysées. We would visit the Notre Dame cathedral, with her chiming about how we should have gotten married there. I would be stating that no, we could never afford that wedding.

Her graying hair would often get in her face and she would brush it away lightly, her touch always gentle with everything she encountered. Back home, she had a green thumb. She loved to garden and had majored in botany in college. She was always so excited for her trip to Paris, where she would fascinate over the spring trees and watching the petals fly. In that moment, I pictured that the wind would blow through the blooming trees and drift petals into her hair, making her shiver.

"It's not that cold," she would say, despite the weather calling for a jacket. "I'm so excited to be here that I just can't stand still, that's all."

I felt rain begin to fall, and saw the locals begin to pull umbrellas from their bags. I sat there, unwavering, enjoying the view while I still could.

My mind flooded with memory of her touch on my skin: laying together in bed, cuddling up to one another. I missed the feeling. It felt cold without her skin pressed to my own.

I couldn't stand sitting there anymore; my back had gotten soaked with rainwater and the chill was biting me to the bone. I paid generously for my food and made my way out.

The rain had started to pour. I grunted with frustration and made my way down the street, trying to get back to my hotel without getting drenched, my arthritic hands growing pain from gripping the base of my umbrella. Water dripped off of the umbrella, small pitters bouncing above as my mind wandered once more.

She loved the thought of Paris. I thought about how she would have fallen in love with the city in that moment, her eyes bright and childlike. I would simply poke fun at her, telling her how sappy and cliche this all was. She would laugh with me, even if it wasn't funny to her, and we would just walk together, talking about the wonders of this city and about wanting to never return home.

At home, she waited. She would be in a hospital bed, her meals being fed to her and her breathing labored if she spoke for too long. It was hard for her to catch her breath these days. I had noticed that, over the past few months, she became so thin and pallid that she looked like a ghost, as fragile as porcelain china.

She was too ill to fly on a plane, so she insisted that I fly here and tell her all about Paris when I got back. I refused at first, not wanting to leave her side, but eventually complied when I realized how badly she wanted to know about how Paris really was. She didn't want a romanticized, overly glorified version of it that you'd see in paintings; she wanted to know it honestly.