{"id":360,"date":"2007-10-19T08:53:00","date_gmt":"2007-10-19T08:53:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olaviakite.com\/maianebula\/2007\/10\/19\/the-european-couple\/"},"modified":"2007-10-19T08:53:00","modified_gmt":"2007-10-19T08:53:00","slug":"the-european-couple","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/olaviakite.com\/maianebula\/2007\/10\/19\/the-european-couple\/","title":{"rendered":"The European Couple"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The European couple drag their suitcases along the road, clinging to their backpacks. They&#8217;re tall and thin, much like the yellowing trees beside them. Not a single smile is drawn on their faces.<\/p>\n<p>The European couple cross the bridge on their bicycles, on their way to who knows where\u2014the library, most probably.<\/p>\n<p>The European couple sit on a bench outside the library. I can see them from the window as my fingers feed words into a white keyboard. I&#8217;m hungry. The girl wears a small dishwater blond bun on top of her head. Or maybe that&#8217;s the guy. Or both. They look alike, except that he is much taller than her, and scruffy blondish hairs cover his face in patches.<\/p>\n<p>The European couple pass me by at the library entrance. The guy smells like summer chased him with water and soap but he was faster. I wonder how the girl can cope with that. She wears a long skirt and rather short stockings. They&#8217;re holding hands. They move their lips, but I can&#8217;t hear their voices; I don&#8217;t know what language they speak, where they come from. I don&#8217;t know why they&#8217;re here, or how long they&#8217;ll stay. I don&#8217;t even know if they really are European.<\/p>\n<p>For some strange reason, I&#8217;ve been running into this pair of unknown people almost every day for the past few months. Meeting them, watching them for a brief moment before getting lost in the crowd is encountering the dramatization of a wish of mine for the future. A pair of bikes, a pair of interlinked hands. A familiar face at the other side of the window, glancing at me, waiting for me to look up and say hello. The discovery of far-off lands in company.<\/p>\n<p>But it is their life I&#8217;m witnessing, not mine. As I realize this, my eyes lose grasp of their presence. It won&#8217;t be hard for them to vanish from my mind once again\u2014the usual elements of a landscape are so easily forgotten!<\/p>\n<p>Looking away, I&#8217;m bound to resume my activities in this world of odds, of lonely prime numbers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The European couple drag their suitcases along the road, clinging to their backpacks. They&#8217;re tall and thin, much like the yellowing trees beside them. Not a single smile is drawn on their faces. The European couple cross the bridge on their bicycles, on their way to who knows where\u2014the library, most probably. The European couple [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/olaviakite.com\/maianebula\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/olaviakite.com\/maianebula\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/olaviakite.com\/maianebula\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/olaviakite.com\/maianebula\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/olaviakite.com\/maianebula\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=360"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/olaviakite.com\/maianebula\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/olaviakite.com\/maianebula\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/olaviakite.com\/maianebula\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/olaviakite.com\/maianebula\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}