Saira Raza (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sairaza) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
gooseberryhigh2017-11-29 08:37 pm
sairaza) wrote in gooseberryhigh2017-11-29 08:37 pm
Entry tags:
(no subject)
Who: Saira Raza and Jonathan Wilde
What: Some light Parisian flirtation.
Where: Paris, France
When: Backdated to Saturday the 25th, early afternoon
Status/Rating: Complete/S for Sarcasm
As she'd told Wilde before, Saira Raza was perhaps one of the few young women in the Western world for whom Paris held no particular allure. Yes, she could understand the aesthetic appeal of Le Tour Eiffel, Notre Dame and l’Avenue des Champs-Élysées, but aesthetic appeal had never held much weight when it came to making up her bucket list, and certainly the city had its own scholarly offerings, but…
Well. It wasn't her first choice for a trip. Which, oddly enough, worked out fairly well. For once in her life, she didn't have an itinerary packed full of things that must be seen, done, studied and taken care of before time ran short. Which meant that she had the leisure to sit around in a cafe with her boyfriend, eating genuinely French croissants and cafe au laits, an experience which even a year ago would have sounded to her like complete nonsense.
“Are you sorry to miss the break at home?” she asked, idly, though not really, because making small-talk seemed like the thing to do and she had to work at it. “Or does Europe make up for it?”
Wilde looks up from his notes (there had been a lot about the Jardin des Plantes he'd wanted to remember) and shakes his head, giving Saira a genuine but somewhat wistful smile.
"Nah. I mean, the holiday's basically meaningless, right?" His mother would disagree vehemently with this statement -- but then, she'd also triple-insisted that he definitely come on this trip (not that it'd ever been a question whether or not he would).
Wilde sets down his pen, closing the journal in front of him. This cafe -- he's forgotten the name -- is so close to the places he'd imagined while packing in Utah that it's kind of weird to really be here. Paris, a little, too. It's wonderful and also a let down, but at least there's Saira, who alternately makes things more meaningful and more surreal.
"If I weren't here, I'd be fucking freezing in the snow in Chicago wishing that I were. Probably." Wilde shrugs, fiddling with the sleeves of a new pullover that looks a little too new, and reaches across the table to touch Saira's fingers with his. "Would've had more time to read, though."
He pauses. "...And I still kind of wish this were Rome."
“Rome,” Saira agrees, wistful. It isn't number one on her list of places, but it is higher than Paris. “Cairo, Alexandria. I could go on.”
She turns her hand up under Wilde's so that her fingertips graze his palm. “But this isn't so bad.”
At least til they get back to Gooseberry and she has time to process the days of study time that she's missed.
"No? You approve?" He's teasing.
Cairo, Alexandria. Maybe someday. For now, there's at least a couple more hours before they have to check in with anyone. There's after that, too, even.
Wilde thinks, settles on phrasing. "It's... cool. Just being away. I mean, Paris -- whatever -- but just... Somewhere without responsibility. Between responsibilities. Like. Nothing matters, right now." Maybe that sounds bad. He shakes his head. "Do you know what I mean? It's... liminal, I guess. If that's a good word."
“Liminal,” Saira says with one of her small, almost secretive, I'm-pleased-but-don’t-want-you-to-see-how-pleased smiles. Her Wilde smiles, you might call them, if you were in the mood to get both sentimental and verbally smacked, “is a very good word. This doesn't feel quite real, somehow. From a campground in Utah to a Parisian cafe; they can't be the same world, can they? And yet we are not dreaming.” There's a pause as she mulls this over, then corrects herself, as she must. “I don't think we are dreaming. Having missed the all the induced lucid dreaming last year, I cannot be sure.”
Wilde's never been sure if missing that dreamscape is something to be relieved about or not -- he wonders how his would have looked, and if knowing that could fix things that are wrong with him now -- but either way, he often wishes he'd just been left in his bed. Like Saira. Untouchable, invincible -- which is how her little smile makes him feel.
"If this were a dream, we'd never run out," here he nods at their various plates and cups, "and I'd never have to try to speak French again."
(French, for Wilde, somehow always comes out sounding very Spanish; it's hard to decide if this is more embarrassing, or if having to resort to English is).
He's quiet for a moment, idly tracing initials into the palm of Saira's hand (hers, then his), and moves his gaze to the broad cafe window. "What else should we do with our freedom?"
Saira cannot, much to her chagrin, mock Wilde's French. Hers is no better; the accent, perhaps, but by no means the grammar, which bears no relation to the languages in which she is fluent or comfortable. Now, in Paris, this seems like lack of foresight. She mourns it every time she must open her mouth to speak to a Parisian.
But at least Wilde's is no better than hers, either.
Fingertips moving against the sensitive skin of her palm make her shiver, and if she recognizes the letters, she disguises that recognition within the sensation - based shudder rather than react.
“I suppose we don't have time for the rest of the Louvre.” Not that she cares overmuch either way. “We could find you a skate park.”
"Not if we ran through it, like in that Godard film." (Left unspoken: this is the only part he remembers from it whatsoever, and that's mostly because of reading The Dreamers.)
"Really?" A quirk to the smile. The board's been peeking out of Wilde’s backpack the whole time they've been in Paris, though there's been little opportunity to use it and it's kind of been more of a nuisance than anything else. By now his devotion is mostly for its own sake, and perhaps a sense of stupid boyish aesthetics.
"Maybe... We could just walk. Get more crêpes" --this is a murmured aside; the amount of crêpes he's eaten in the last few days is verging on Much-- "go somewhere to look at the Seine -- the Pont Neuf? Oldest bridge."
Saira shakes her head, but she's smiling. Indulgent, even, which feels more foreign to her than the language people are speaking all around them. She sort of likes it; she will be terrified by that later, but for now she just rolls her eyes in a way meant to convey how little she means it. “More crepes. What will you do when we are back in Utah and you are cut off?”
"Request them? Learn to make them?" Wilde shrugs, slipping his journal and pens into his bag. "I mean, it can't be that hard, right? Except for maaaybe giving my dad the wrong idea."
Any extra interest in cooking or baking is an extra awkward moment between them later, when he has to say he's definitely not taking over bakery stuff ever in his life. (It's the only thing he's sure about when it comes to his future right now, which will make it even more awkward when it comes up). But enough of that -- this is a liminal space and none of this has to be relevant. Or real.
Wilde takes his scarf from where it's draped over the back of his chair, then leans over and arranges it casually around Saira's shoulders before slipping his jacket on. "Shall we? Is that cool?" Now that he's thought of it, he's a little antsy for a walk.
“Gardener, philosopher, chef…” Saira rattles off as she stands, securing Wilde’s scarf more snuggly around her shoulders. “Is there anything you don’t plan to do? At any rate, I believe crepes involve cooking, not baking, so it should not get your father’s hopes too high.”
She takes his hand and nods toward the door; their bill is paid, so there’s no reason to linger now that they’ve decided to go.
Outside, Wilde takes a moment to reorient, then starts on the walk toward the Pont Neuf. At least, what he assumes is the walk toward the Pont Neuf, anyway -- but using the river as a compass has worked so far.
"The longer we're here, my interest is in smaller and smaller things," he says, thinking aloud. "Do you know what I mean? It's like the scale of what's noteworthy is shrinking."
“Familiarity breeds contempt,” Saira replies, glancing around at their surroundings and evidently finding them less interesting than her boyfriend's face, as she turns back to look at it instead. “For tourist traps, at least. Besides, I suspect that most people- you included- take one look at what the school deems important for us to see and immediately wish to see the opposite instead. No?”
"The opposite? Sometimes."
Wilde gives her a soft little smile. "I just know what I want, I guess. What's important. Or just worth wasting my time on." Because what is anything, really? It's not as easy to be morbid as usual, though, in a place like this. He has to give Paris that. Except that it probably has more to do with the company and less to do with the quality of the light or the vibrance of the spirit.
"Hey," he says, something occurring to him. "My instax is in my backpack. We should take a picture at the Pont Neuf. So we can see what this really looked like, when we're in the real world again and start remembering it better."
Saira laughs at the thought and shakes her head, the edges of her hijab rippling in the breeze with her movements. “Can one photograph a liminal space?” she teases, eyebrows arching. “That sounds like pinning it to a board like a butterfly, Jonathan. And various other cliches about trying to hold on to the ephemeral.”
She squeezes his hand softly, cocks her head at him. “I think you just want a photograph of the two of us together here.” It’s a little assessing, but mostly it’s teasing, for her startlingly warm and fond.
Wilde makes a gesture with his hands, as though framing her in an invisible lens. "Snapshots of the mind's eye develop unreliably," he says, in a mockingly grave tone.
It's not exactly true, after all. He probably will remember most of this quite clearly.
He does nod at her following question, in the vague way he often uses to respond with less commitment or enthusiasm. Soft for sure yes. He would like a photograph together, maybe to prove later that any of this happened at all.
"In case of nostalgia."
“For when we are old and gray and this time is but a memory?” Saira replies, gesturing at the scene around them: Paris, the passersby, their own close proximity to each other. “Or for a week from now, to prove that it happened at all when your friends ask what you were off doing?”
What: Some light Parisian flirtation.
Where: Paris, France
When: Backdated to Saturday the 25th, early afternoon
Status/Rating: Complete/S for Sarcasm
As she'd told Wilde before, Saira Raza was perhaps one of the few young women in the Western world for whom Paris held no particular allure. Yes, she could understand the aesthetic appeal of Le Tour Eiffel, Notre Dame and l’Avenue des Champs-Élysées, but aesthetic appeal had never held much weight when it came to making up her bucket list, and certainly the city had its own scholarly offerings, but…
Well. It wasn't her first choice for a trip. Which, oddly enough, worked out fairly well. For once in her life, she didn't have an itinerary packed full of things that must be seen, done, studied and taken care of before time ran short. Which meant that she had the leisure to sit around in a cafe with her boyfriend, eating genuinely French croissants and cafe au laits, an experience which even a year ago would have sounded to her like complete nonsense.
“Are you sorry to miss the break at home?” she asked, idly, though not really, because making small-talk seemed like the thing to do and she had to work at it. “Or does Europe make up for it?”
Wilde looks up from his notes (there had been a lot about the Jardin des Plantes he'd wanted to remember) and shakes his head, giving Saira a genuine but somewhat wistful smile.
"Nah. I mean, the holiday's basically meaningless, right?" His mother would disagree vehemently with this statement -- but then, she'd also triple-insisted that he definitely come on this trip (not that it'd ever been a question whether or not he would).
Wilde sets down his pen, closing the journal in front of him. This cafe -- he's forgotten the name -- is so close to the places he'd imagined while packing in Utah that it's kind of weird to really be here. Paris, a little, too. It's wonderful and also a let down, but at least there's Saira, who alternately makes things more meaningful and more surreal.
"If I weren't here, I'd be fucking freezing in the snow in Chicago wishing that I were. Probably." Wilde shrugs, fiddling with the sleeves of a new pullover that looks a little too new, and reaches across the table to touch Saira's fingers with his. "Would've had more time to read, though."
He pauses. "...And I still kind of wish this were Rome."
“Rome,” Saira agrees, wistful. It isn't number one on her list of places, but it is higher than Paris. “Cairo, Alexandria. I could go on.”
She turns her hand up under Wilde's so that her fingertips graze his palm. “But this isn't so bad.”
At least til they get back to Gooseberry and she has time to process the days of study time that she's missed.
"No? You approve?" He's teasing.
Cairo, Alexandria. Maybe someday. For now, there's at least a couple more hours before they have to check in with anyone. There's after that, too, even.
Wilde thinks, settles on phrasing. "It's... cool. Just being away. I mean, Paris -- whatever -- but just... Somewhere without responsibility. Between responsibilities. Like. Nothing matters, right now." Maybe that sounds bad. He shakes his head. "Do you know what I mean? It's... liminal, I guess. If that's a good word."
“Liminal,” Saira says with one of her small, almost secretive, I'm-pleased-but-don’t-want-you-to-see-how-pleased smiles. Her Wilde smiles, you might call them, if you were in the mood to get both sentimental and verbally smacked, “is a very good word. This doesn't feel quite real, somehow. From a campground in Utah to a Parisian cafe; they can't be the same world, can they? And yet we are not dreaming.” There's a pause as she mulls this over, then corrects herself, as she must. “I don't think we are dreaming. Having missed the all the induced lucid dreaming last year, I cannot be sure.”
Wilde's never been sure if missing that dreamscape is something to be relieved about or not -- he wonders how his would have looked, and if knowing that could fix things that are wrong with him now -- but either way, he often wishes he'd just been left in his bed. Like Saira. Untouchable, invincible -- which is how her little smile makes him feel.
"If this were a dream, we'd never run out," here he nods at their various plates and cups, "and I'd never have to try to speak French again."
(French, for Wilde, somehow always comes out sounding very Spanish; it's hard to decide if this is more embarrassing, or if having to resort to English is).
He's quiet for a moment, idly tracing initials into the palm of Saira's hand (hers, then his), and moves his gaze to the broad cafe window. "What else should we do with our freedom?"
Saira cannot, much to her chagrin, mock Wilde's French. Hers is no better; the accent, perhaps, but by no means the grammar, which bears no relation to the languages in which she is fluent or comfortable. Now, in Paris, this seems like lack of foresight. She mourns it every time she must open her mouth to speak to a Parisian.
But at least Wilde's is no better than hers, either.
Fingertips moving against the sensitive skin of her palm make her shiver, and if she recognizes the letters, she disguises that recognition within the sensation - based shudder rather than react.
“I suppose we don't have time for the rest of the Louvre.” Not that she cares overmuch either way. “We could find you a skate park.”
"Not if we ran through it, like in that Godard film." (Left unspoken: this is the only part he remembers from it whatsoever, and that's mostly because of reading The Dreamers.)
"Really?" A quirk to the smile. The board's been peeking out of Wilde’s backpack the whole time they've been in Paris, though there's been little opportunity to use it and it's kind of been more of a nuisance than anything else. By now his devotion is mostly for its own sake, and perhaps a sense of stupid boyish aesthetics.
"Maybe... We could just walk. Get more crêpes" --this is a murmured aside; the amount of crêpes he's eaten in the last few days is verging on Much-- "go somewhere to look at the Seine -- the Pont Neuf? Oldest bridge."
Saira shakes her head, but she's smiling. Indulgent, even, which feels more foreign to her than the language people are speaking all around them. She sort of likes it; she will be terrified by that later, but for now she just rolls her eyes in a way meant to convey how little she means it. “More crepes. What will you do when we are back in Utah and you are cut off?”
"Request them? Learn to make them?" Wilde shrugs, slipping his journal and pens into his bag. "I mean, it can't be that hard, right? Except for maaaybe giving my dad the wrong idea."
Any extra interest in cooking or baking is an extra awkward moment between them later, when he has to say he's definitely not taking over bakery stuff ever in his life. (It's the only thing he's sure about when it comes to his future right now, which will make it even more awkward when it comes up). But enough of that -- this is a liminal space and none of this has to be relevant. Or real.
Wilde takes his scarf from where it's draped over the back of his chair, then leans over and arranges it casually around Saira's shoulders before slipping his jacket on. "Shall we? Is that cool?" Now that he's thought of it, he's a little antsy for a walk.
“Gardener, philosopher, chef…” Saira rattles off as she stands, securing Wilde’s scarf more snuggly around her shoulders. “Is there anything you don’t plan to do? At any rate, I believe crepes involve cooking, not baking, so it should not get your father’s hopes too high.”
She takes his hand and nods toward the door; their bill is paid, so there’s no reason to linger now that they’ve decided to go.
Outside, Wilde takes a moment to reorient, then starts on the walk toward the Pont Neuf. At least, what he assumes is the walk toward the Pont Neuf, anyway -- but using the river as a compass has worked so far.
"The longer we're here, my interest is in smaller and smaller things," he says, thinking aloud. "Do you know what I mean? It's like the scale of what's noteworthy is shrinking."
“Familiarity breeds contempt,” Saira replies, glancing around at their surroundings and evidently finding them less interesting than her boyfriend's face, as she turns back to look at it instead. “For tourist traps, at least. Besides, I suspect that most people- you included- take one look at what the school deems important for us to see and immediately wish to see the opposite instead. No?”
"The opposite? Sometimes."
Wilde gives her a soft little smile. "I just know what I want, I guess. What's important. Or just worth wasting my time on." Because what is anything, really? It's not as easy to be morbid as usual, though, in a place like this. He has to give Paris that. Except that it probably has more to do with the company and less to do with the quality of the light or the vibrance of the spirit.
"Hey," he says, something occurring to him. "My instax is in my backpack. We should take a picture at the Pont Neuf. So we can see what this really looked like, when we're in the real world again and start remembering it better."
Saira laughs at the thought and shakes her head, the edges of her hijab rippling in the breeze with her movements. “Can one photograph a liminal space?” she teases, eyebrows arching. “That sounds like pinning it to a board like a butterfly, Jonathan. And various other cliches about trying to hold on to the ephemeral.”
She squeezes his hand softly, cocks her head at him. “I think you just want a photograph of the two of us together here.” It’s a little assessing, but mostly it’s teasing, for her startlingly warm and fond.
Wilde makes a gesture with his hands, as though framing her in an invisible lens. "Snapshots of the mind's eye develop unreliably," he says, in a mockingly grave tone.
It's not exactly true, after all. He probably will remember most of this quite clearly.
He does nod at her following question, in the vague way he often uses to respond with less commitment or enthusiasm. Soft for sure yes. He would like a photograph together, maybe to prove later that any of this happened at all.
"In case of nostalgia."
“For when we are old and gray and this time is but a memory?” Saira replies, gesturing at the scene around them: Paris, the passersby, their own close proximity to each other. “Or for a week from now, to prove that it happened at all when your friends ask what you were off doing?”