Between espressos and apricots

I think I'm dreaming. I'm alone in my bed, sunk in sleep between the indented pillows and twisted sheets, but I feel a soft touch on my bare wrist. It's like a tickle and a brushstroke of a breeze combined; one moment it's here, the other it goes. Through the window the sunlight amplifies, my eyelids fail to screen it, I wake up. It must be close to midday: the sun is brighter than itself. I squint at it and in my eyes it looks like a ripe apricot in mid-July, rich orange and intense. The light has gotten iridescent, too.

The summer in the city is at its most lustrous these days, it sparkles like champagne, especially after a bout of unruly rain blown around by wind. The storms have somewhat blemished the scyscape recently, but it's only temporary, of course it is. On my birthday it was very hot, it seemed the air had entirely evaporated. I drank champagne that day, brut, it tasted like freshly baked puff pastry and vanilla cream. It felt enthusiastic on my tongue.

I slept through breakfast, but that's ok. I'll have breakfast for lunch. I'm thinking to roast some apricots with a little honey and lemon juice. It won't take long, about twenty minutes in a moderate oven. I'll only have to rinse and halve them, and then wait for the gentle heat to metamorphose them into soft edible suns. 

The warm fruit, relaxed, mellow, half honey, half almond in taste, will be a fine match -- and contrast -- to a bowl of fromage blanc, tangy and satisfying. My favourite part is when the juice from the apricots, perfumed and sharp, seeps into the fromage blanc and the two make the tip of my tongue curl upward and lips go smack smack. But first I want to get out for an espresso. I need it to shoot down my limbs, to diffuse like ink in my bloodstream.

The rest of the day finds its way between espressos and apricots, an unworried midsummer afternoon.

The touch on my wrist in the late morning -- it was my own breath.