The Scar That Will Remind Me of Having Been Happy Is Always Beautiful

More about The Scar That Will Remind Me of Having Been Happy Is Always Beautiful

In Paris, the afternoon sat at our table like a third cup of coffee.

The Eiffel Tower stood in the distance pretending to be serious, while you wore a fool’s cap bright enough to confuse the weather and glasses so elaborate they looked as though they had been borrowed from a butterfly on holiday.

I wore my own impossible spectacles.

Together we looked like two escaped decorations from a forgotten carnival.

The waiter didn’t seem surprised.

Paris has seen stranger things.

You smiled across the table.

The kind of smile that makes clocks lose interest in their jobs.

For a moment, the city stopped trying to become history and simply became sunlight resting on a café table.

Years later, I know exactly what remains of that afternoon.

Not the coffee.

Not the conversation.

Not even the details.

Happiness is shy.

It slips away carrying its suitcase before you notice it has left.

What remains is the scar.

A small shining mark hidden somewhere beneath the ribs.

Not a wound.

A signature.

Proof that joy once passed through.

I think that is why scars from happiness are always beautiful.

They are the opposite of monuments.

Monuments try to remember everything.

Scars remember only what matters.

A laugh.

A face.

The color of impossible glasses.

The way somebody tilted their head and turned an ordinary afternoon into a permanent country inside your heart.

The fool’s cap is gone now.

The coffee cups have long since been washed and returned to service.

The afternoon has drifted downstream into the great river where all afternoons eventually go.

Yet something remains.

A small golden line running through memory.

A scar.

Beautiful because it was made by happiness.

Beautiful because it proves that, for one impossible Paris afternoon, two people sat beneath the patient gaze of the Eiffel Tower and turned a café into a celebration of being alive.