The Secret Lives of People in Love

For lonely people, rain is a chance to be touched.

She told me that love is when a person introduces you to yourself for the first time.

I wonder if Michel is a famous poet. My teacher at school told me that poets come from all walks of life and that their gift is God-given. I wonder if people will flock to Michel’s grave at Père-Lachaise Cemetery a hundred years from now. I wonder if they’ll leave their own poems at the foot of his tombstone and then talk to him and maybe thank him for his little birds, which sing to them in moments of darkness

Our apartment in the 11th is quite basic. All the windows open into a courtyard of other windows. With the lights out, I can see people’s lives unfold. A person’s life is a slow flash, and I watch my neighbors argue, make up, make love, and fry meat. I can tell that one of my neighbors is unhappy, because he sits by the telephone and sometimes picks it up to make sure he can hear a dial tone, but it never rings when he’s at home. Michel says his wife left him, and if there’s ever a time I can’t think of anyone to pray for, I should pray for him

When I was nine, Michel gave me the option of going into an orphanage but explained how he had grown up in one and they were not pleasant

He told me that his poems were not meant for me—that they were little flocks of birds intended to keep the other birds company. When I asked him who the poems were for, his eye pushed out a solitary tear that was rerouted by his scar

Sandrine sometimes buys me a book and leaves it with one of the other girls if she’s working. The last one she gave me was called The Man Who Planted Hope and Grew Happiness.

Even though I want to go to university and eventually buy Michel a red convertible, when I think of those Sundays in the Jardin des Plantes, I want to do things for people they will never forget. Maybe that’s the best I can do in life.

Sometimes small bolts of lightning shoot from the boats as tourists take pictures of one another, and sometimes they just aim the cameras at nothing in particular and shoot—I like these kinds of photographs best, not that I have a camera—but if I did, I would randomly take pictures of nothing in particular. How else could you record life as it happens

I suppose the key to a good life is to gently overlook the truth and hope that at any moment we can all be reborn.