It’s been 25 years since Jesse and Celine wandered a dreamlike Vienna in Before Sunrise. Would the city dance for us as it had danced for them?
*
We chose Vienna for a pre-Christmas break because we’d heard it was a city that shines in December. The days, typically clouded and dank, draw visitors to the cafes and the museums, while the Christmas markets warm the chilly nights and cast a soft light that evokes an old world romance. I’d reserved for my wife Uzma and I a private waltz lesson at the Palais am Beethovenplatz, and tickets to a Mozart recital at a church with a classical pedigree. I planned to linger in the coffeehouses, eating Sachertorte and imagining myself an inheritor of Stefan Zweig’s cosmopolitan ideal, a century on from its heyday.
It was only once the trip was booked that I became aware, with a prickling self-consciousness, of another motive for our visit. I realized that we intended to recreate the path a pair of fictional lovers had trodden through the streets of Vienna, and, by doing so, test the join between our romantic reality and the fantasy their journey described.
The fictional lovers are Jesse and Celine, and the movie in which they first appear—and which has become, since its release in 1995, a cult favorite among hopeless romantics, spawning two sequels to date—is Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise. For anyone not familiar with the film: Jesse, an American aspiring documentary filmmaker (Ethan Hawke), and Celine, a French college student (Julie Delpy) meet on a train. Jesse is returning from an ill-fated vacation in Madrid, and will disembark at Vienna, from where he’ll fly back to the US the next morning. Celine has come from a visit with her grandmother in Budapest, and is heading back to school in Paris. They start talking. A spark of attraction is ignited. Jesse persuades Celine to get off the train with him, and they spend the rest of the day and night wandering Vienna, talking—about themselves, about the world, about love—until sunrise breaks the spell and Jesse must leave to catch his flight. It’s a film light on incident and rich with the drama of two strangers connecting. Beautiful and naïve they may both be, and yet, despite their earnestness, or perhaps because of it, we root for them. Every conversation between the pair is charged with a heady wonder and jeopardy peculiar to young love.
How real or how fanciful it all feels will depend largely on the viewer’s circumstances and disposition: how old they were when they first saw the movie, how loved or how lonely, how inclined to believe in the notion of soulmates. For my own part, I’d always interpreted my love of the movie as solid proof of my romantic credentials. It should be noted that I first discovered the film when I was a young man still waiting to find someone special, and still burdened by expectations of romance that were shaped more by Hollywood mythology than by real world experience. It should be noted, too, that at the time of our visit Uzma and I had two decades on Jesse and Celine. The casual circumstances of their meeting and the languid ease of their courtship don’t tally with the experience Uzma and I recall, eight years into our relationship.
Though we met in a manner that might befit a fictional retelling—we were friends at school from the age of five, who reconnected in adulthood after 25 years apart and were married within a year of our reunion—the fact of our differing faiths and races presented certain challenges from which Jesse and Celine were exempted. Because the odds had been against us from the beginning, we’d always recognized a rareness in our love, though we never dwelt on it. Perhaps another reason for taking the Before Sunrise tour was to compare ourselves to our young alter egos, and see just how rare we were.
Before we left for Vienna, we watched the movie again. I’d seen it maybe half a dozen times already; Uzma only once previously. What initially struck me was the distance I now felt from those 23-year-olds, with their youthful sincerity and their callow ideas about love. I realized that I identified more with the versions of Jesse and Celine as they appear in Before Sunset, the second entry in the trilogy: nine years older and wiser, seasoned and rounded out by the regrets and compromises of the intervening years; in short, grown-ups to the first film’s adolescents. This was to be expected, of course. I’m 42 years old. And yet I worried that this might impair my ability to enjoy our trip for the thing I suspected it would become: a dance with the ghosts of my youth and theirs.
What is tourism if not an examination of oneself under new conditions?Between us we decided on a number of locations from the movie which we’d visit if our schedule allowed. We had some help in identifying them: an internet search quickly yielded a number of walking tours, lovingly assembled by fans of the movie who’ve reconnoitred the city on behalf of those who wish to follow in Jesse and Celine’s footsteps. The locations we chose were all within a walk or a short tram or U-Bahn ride of our hotel in the central Leopoldstadt district. Our approach to them, or so we thought in those days of planning, would be much the same as to those stops on our itinerary which were unrelated to the movie: a new place to visit, to wander, to take a picture. A place to be a tourist, and not much else. But what is tourism if not an examination of oneself under new conditions?
We arrived in Vienna in the early evening, a week before Christmas, after a two-hour flight from London. The sky was already dark and the city’s lights twinkled, illuminating the bridges that span the Danube canal, separating Leopoldstadt from the Innere Stadt, the historical hub, and strung as baubles along the Rotenturmstrasse, one of the main shopping streets leading to Stephansplatz. Dominating the square, the Gothic-Romanesque marvel of the Stephansdom, the city’s Roman Catholic cathedral (sponsored by the watchmaker Breitling if the giant advertising banners scaling its walls were anything to go by) and surrounding this the glowing chalets of a Christmas market, selling tree ornaments and costume jewelry and würstels and punsch, and marzipan truffles bearing Mozart’s portrait on their wrapping. But these attractions didn’t delay us for long; having taken an acclimatizing stroll through inner streets clogged with sightseers, we were eager to begin our private pilgrimage. First stop: Vienna’s iconic Riesenrad, the 19th-century Ferris wheel situated in the Prater amusement park, a half-hour walk away, back across the river in Leopoldstadt.
In the movie, the Ferris wheel is the setting for Jesse and Celine’s first kiss. They have a cabin to themselves, and a sunset to inspire amorous feelings. We arrived too late for the sunset, of course, and we shared a cabin with a group of teenage girls taking selfies and a grey-haired husband and wife who softly teased each other in German throughout the wheel’s slow revolution. Any hope that we might somehow capture the movie’s magic on our first attempt seemed suddenly foolish. As we gazed out of the cabin’s window, Vienna’s skyline submerged in night, the features of the amusement park diminishing below us, I felt a sense of trespass: I’d sought to impose my mawkish agenda on the city and the city had responded with rightful disdain.
And then the older couple began to dance. The husband took his wife’s hand and waltzed her, flushed and giggling, around the cabin. The young girls made room for them by shuffling to the bench in the center of the floating room. When they caught our eyes the couple smiled with coy mischief and self-deprecation, as if to confide to us that this wasn’t how they usually behaved, but that some erroneous, playful impulse had momentarily seized them.
Then, just like that, they spun to a stop. The husband recovered his former timidity, and sat down in silence, his smile fading to all but a shadow. But the wife wasn’t yet ready to denounce the quiet splendor of the moment, and she fumbled a compact camera from the pocket of her coat and began goading her husband into posing for a selfie, her free arm lifting him abruptly to his feet and then hooking him by the neck so that they stood shoulder to shoulder. The husband was having none of it, squirming from his wife’s grasp. Instead she gestured to Uzma and I, and dutifully Uzma handed her phone to the wife and she snapped us as we posed in a series of easy embraces.
She seemed pleased to have done this favor for us, and we were pleased to have shared in her fleeting return to a younger iteration of herself. As we disembarked and wandered through the giftshop at the wheel’s base and back out into the park, we felt a small sense of achievement. We’d reminded the night of its duty to lovers, to gallantly provide us with memories fit for snow globes.
In the Prater’s main square a stage had been erected, and a young girl and a boy with a guitar were performing enthusiastic covers of German-language pop songs. Before them a small crowd had gathered, clapping along, most of them pie-eyed and swaying, their cockles warmed by punsch in plastic cups. A foursome of local revelers, two married couples of spry middle age, were drunkenly dancing. Spying us as we stood on the periphery, they beckoned us to join them, and before we knew it we were part of a circle, the six of us linked by hands, spinning to the music; first solemnly as strangers do, but quickly loosening as we relaxed into each other’s company. When one song ended and the next, a ballad, began, we broke into mixed pairs and lurched into a knock-kneed waltz.
Uzma and I are gregarious travelers. Not only is it in our nature to actively seek connections and friendships with the people we meet on our holidays; since the Brexit vote we feel an extra obligation to assure our European hosts, with our conviviality and our openness, that we still think of them as brethren. To be recognized as such by our kindly dancing partners—lubricated as they were by alcohol and by the flamboyant mood of the season—stoked in us the belief that Vienna might indeed be a city with romance in its blood, with or without an American movie to emblemize it. Being accepted as kindred spirits, based only on an assumption of a shared grace—something deep down and unexamined, as dim and significant as a desire to move as one to the stirring chimes of a guitar played by a boy with red cheeks—isn’t that as romantic as things get in this fractured, troubled world?
It was past ten when we walked back to our hotel, and the streets were empty. Alone for the first time since we’d arrived, we allowed ourselves to voice the speculations we’d been privately indulging: speculations on what Vienna might offer or withhold from us through the rest of our stay, and on the shape Jesse and Celine’s second day together might have taken had the world of the trilogy adhered to a narrower path. Before Sunrise ends with the couple agreeing to reconvene in Vienna, six months to the day after their first encounter. Today was that day: December 16th. Our trip had accidentally coincided with this anniversary, heightening the sense that we were somehow enacting an alternative sequel, embodying the characters of Jesse and Celine as they revisited a city that, while colder, still remembered them clearly and with a fondness. Perhaps we could guide them on their first winter walk, as we ourselves, in our years together, had navigated many and knew where the ice was thinnest.
Day two began with a tram ride around the Ringstrasse, the grand boulevard encircling the Innere Stadt, which is lined with many of Vienna’s most important public buildings. At the Kunsthistorisches the line for tickets to the Bruegel exhibition moved slowly, and Uzma left me queueing to take pictures of the statue of Empress Maria Theresa which presides over the square outside the museum, and which appears briefly in the movie, Jesse and Celine wandering past en route to another tram stop and a ride to a cemetery for young suicides washed up on the banks of the Danube. We’d already decided that even in daylight it was too dark and cold to venture down to the water’s edge, and so we omitted from our itinerary the scenes in which the river takes a prominent role. These deviations from the movie’s route were necessary if we were to maintain a pretense of autonomy about our days; we were not here as interlopers into another couple’s history, but as curators of our own. It just so happens that our history consists in good part of the fictions that console us.
It was later that afternoon—having fled the Kunsthistorisches on finding that the Bruegel tickets had sold out, and gone instead to tread the imperial apartments of the Schönbrunn Palace, so opulent and storied and sterile behind Perspex barriers—that fiction and reality became most stubbornly conjoined.
To the uninitiated, the upper terrace of the Albertina museum, which overlooks both the opera house and the historic Hotel Sacher, birthplace of the torte which bears its name, is just another patch of Innere Stadt real estate; unexceptionally ornate and surprisingly quiet, its only other visitors, when we arrived in the middle of the afternoon, a young and pretty couple of indeterminate European stock and a small group of Chinese twenty-somethings who took turns to pose daringly for pictures on its concrete balustrades, while Uzma and I fretted like disapproving elders over the 20-foot drop to the pavement below. If they were aware of the provenance of the place then they made no outward show of it. Perhaps they were simply too cool to flaunt it.
I, on the other hand, found myself on the verge of tears as I took in the view across the railings and out towards the intersection of Operngasse and Philharmoniker Strasse, an aspect forever aligned in my mind’s eye with its corresponding shot in the movie. Jesse and Celine pay two visits to this spot, in what are two of the film’s pivotal moments. In the first, it is night, and they’re moved to acknowledge the weight of time pressing down on them. In a few short hours their time together will be at an end, and they’re not quite ready to confront the implications of it.
It just so happens that our history consists in good part of the fictions that console us.“I feel like this is some dream world we’re in,” Jesse says.
“It’s like our time together is ours,” Celine says. “It’s our own creation. It shouldn’t officially be happening, and that’s why it feels so otherworldly.”
They’ll turn into pumpkins before long.
Later, when they return, dawn has come and they’re almost out of time. On the steps of the statue of Archduke Albrecht that overlooks the terrace, our young lovers recline. Awareness of their impending separation has stolen their words, and so Jesse, earnestly and with winsome schmaltziness, begins to recite Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening”:
But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.
In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.
It’s an obvious choice of poem to denote a mood of bittersweet fatality. And yet, as we sat down on those same steps—shuffling and shifting and testing the sightlines until we were convinced we had the right spot—Uzma and I were both mindful of having conquered Time. Officially, we shouldn’t have made it this far.
When Uzma, a Muslim of Pakistani extraction, first told her family about me, a white Brit of no particular faith, we’d already been secretly dating for five months. For several months following her revelation, it was touch and go whether we’d be permitted to stay together. Her family’s concerns ranged from the irrational to the pragmatic, and rather than risk ostracism by defying them we worked hard to win them over. I’d always wanted a love that felt true to the movies on which I’d based my romantic ideals. A love worth fighting for, and worth changing for. Here it was, and it had come without my bidding or invitation. Now I had to earn it. We both did.
In those first secret months of our courtship we felt as if we existed outside of time. We’d snatch stolen hours together, one eye on the clock, and then go back to our separate lives, obliged to keep hidden the changes we were effecting in each other. To carve our own alternative timeline—a future where we could be together, not at the expense of family honor or cultural fidelity but in some kind of harmony with those broader obligations—required sacrifice and compromise, and more patience than either of us felt we possessed in those urgent days of love’s first flushes. But we got there, and though the last seven years have not been without their challenges, we’ve shared a happiness neither of us ever really expected, given where we started from.
And so, the sun dipping over the rooftops, its light draining from the sky so that our dusk resembled their dawn, we felt the presence of Jesse and Celine and of the twist of fate that would part them. In grasping the imaginative cord that joined us we were also communing with the version of us that didn’t make it, because time had ran out for us as it had for them. An unexpected gravity immobilized us. For half an hour I couldn’t move, and I didn’t want to leave.
I breathed in the anguish and gratitude that seemed to dapple the air, that I might take it with me when we left, like a store of fat to see us through a winter yet to come. Should things get tough, we’d have those reserves to draw on. In this way, a fragment of Vienna that exists only as pixels will nourish us just as much as the hours we spent waltzing in a warm, high room overlooking the park, or listening to a string quartet play Mozart’s Spring in the vaulted nave of the Annakirche.
So far, our pilgrimage had been a strictly private affair. Out of mild embarrassment, or a sense of protecting something sacred, we hadn’t breathed a word of it to anyone else, even that young European couple on the terrace of the Albertina who looked, after all, with their careful posing and the hushed intimacy of their conversation, as if they might have been there for the same reason as us. There was safety in keeping our fantasy between ourselves, just as there was safety in keeping our love secret in the early days when the world might have taken it from us. And so it was with some anxiety that we climbed the steps to Windmühlgasse, a quiet street just beyond the Ringstrasse, and approached Teuchtler Schallplattenhandlung, a small record shop informally known as Alt & Neu for the sign that hangs above its door, illuminated like a beacon of retro comforts in an otherwise digital world.
At first glance we assumed the shop to be closed, and took turns to pose dolefully for photographs beneath the sign. Perhaps it was better that we’d come too late; going inside would have meant confessing to something for which we might have been mocked or misunderstood. I pictured Jack Black’s character in Stephen Frears’ High Fidelity, a gargoyle of vinyl snobbery, seizing on our tourist whimsy as soon as we walked through the door and mercilessly heckling us for it.
I’d embarked upon our journey with no pretensions that the movie’s romanticism would be reciprocated by the citizens of Vienna; in fact, I’d supposed that if the film meant anything to them at all it would be as a millstone, the way The Godfather is to the people of the eastern half of Sicily, who lament the conflation foreigners insist on making between them and the Mafia clichés that still haunt the west side of the island, and which their less proud and scrupulous shopkeepers continue to feed with their racks of unofficial merchandise, T-shirts and aprons and fridge magnets and bottle openers all plastered with the leering face of Brando as Vito Corleone. Surely there exists no more vocal an enemy of cliché and sentimentalism than a record shop owner; particularly the owner of a record shop which has become inextricably associated with a film that so artlessly wears its heart on its sleeve.
But then we met Philip.
He made no assumptions about the reason for our visit. He merely saw us loitering outside and invited us in, leaving us to browse the shelves of vinyl unmolested. The place was cozy and cluttered as the best record shops are; four or five customers shuffled quietly around the rows, while another, a long-haired man in his twenties, chatted casually with Philip as he listened via headphones to a record on one of the bank of turntables on the counter. Uzma and I were silent. A moment later our fear that Philip might be in militant denial of the position his store held in movie folklore was dispelled. We saw the two framed Before Sunrise posters, one hung behind the counter and the other on a door at the back where we’d hoped to find a listening booth. Displayed prominently, too, the sleeve of Kath Bloom’s “Come Here”, the song which has become synonymous with the scene in which it appears.
Jesse and Celine wander into the same record shop in which Uzma and I were now standing. Celine selects a Kath Bloom album and leads Jesse into the listening booth. The needle is gently lowered and a plaintive, faintly kitsch acoustic ballad begins to play. Standing close together in the tiny booth, they listen, Celine with self-conscious hesitancy, Jesse with barely-contained amusement at the ingenuousness of her choice. Their eyes wander to each other, away, back again, awkwardly exploring, risking, averting; a wordless courtship playing out over the course of the song. It’s a sweet little scene, and one you’d expect Uzma and I to be far too worldly and cynical to attach any weight to now. Except we’re not cynical. Such moments still speak to us.
When we discovered that the listening booth was no longer there—we’d later learn, in chatting with the long-haired man, that it had been a prop constructed for the scene, by his father no less—our disappointment must have been visible, for Philip looked at us directly then, and in a benign tone asked if we were here because of the movie.
Of course we were. There was no hiding it. I felt a rush of shame. But then something rather wonderful happened. Philip’s face split into a wide, warm grin, and with its encouragement I began to ramble about how much the film meant to us. Philip seemed genuinely delighted.
“Then you must have your song,” he said.
There was safety in keeping our fantasy between ourselves, just as there was safety in keeping our love secret in the early days when the world might have taken it from us.He turned to the woman behind the counter and gave her an instruction in German. With a deliciously sour and disparaging expression—she must have indulged this request a thousand times—she reached down and retrieved a copy of the Kath Bloom album, and slapped it on the turntable. The strains of “Come Here” filled the shop, and Uzma and I—because it felt right, and expected, and because we were guests in their city, and because, though we hadn’t known it until that moment, it was what we’d come here to do—slow danced, our eyes tightly closed, disappearing into each other for the duration of the song.
I remember thinking as we danced, making a public display of our private sweetness, that we’d made our own luck, and that other people could see that and were generously disposed to us because of it.
When it was over, we opened our eyes to find Philip beaming down at us; unprompted, and with obvious pleasure, he proceeded to direct us in a 15-minute photoshoot, staging cutesy recreations of Jesse and Celine’s visit. We pretended to browse the same racks they had browsed, stood where the listening booth had been, the doorway to the storeroom in which it had been built left open to expose the border between movie magic and workaday real life. At Philip’s say-so the other customers made room for us; the woman behind the counter turned out to be just as sweet as him, slipping free records into the tote bag I’d bought as a souvenir. Goodbyes when they came were made several times over. Philip followed us out onto the street and took more pictures of us standing arm in arm under his sign.
“I don’t want to take up too much of your time,” I said.
“All I’ve got is time,” he smiled, and I wondered if he might be a minor angel, placed here to shunt doe-eyed couples towards their little epiphanies. There were hugs and waves and finally we left him, braced against the cold, to follow his directions down to the Café Sperl and another tryst with a mythology of our own making.
By now I’d forgotten all about Stefan Zweig’s Vienna and had fallen irretrievably for Linklater’s vision of the city. At the Café Sperl the two briefly merged. Never mind that Zweig had in fact favored its rival venue, the Café Central; the Sperl had changed little aesthetically since its 1880 inception, and epitomized the Viennese coffeehouse culture of which I’d wanted to partake. Picture parquet floors and marble table tops, and billiards tables fanned with the day’s newspapers. Red and gold jacquard adorned its banquettes, its Jugendstil patterns worn to a shine by generations of locals and tourists alike. We were still high from events at the Alt & Neu, and quickly brushed aside the disappointment of finding that the booth in which Jesse and Celine had sat was occupied. Taking the next booth along, we ordered the requisite coffee and apfelstrudel, which arrived on individual silver trays, borne by a waiter who remained oblivious to our history.
In the movie, Jesse and Celine stage imaginary phone calls home, in which they confess to a friend that they’ve “met someone.” Jesse plays the role of the friend in Celine’s conversation, and vice versa: this conceit provides a protective layer of irony through which an illuminating candor emerges. By adopting a persona, one can tell a truth which might otherwise remain buried in caution and restraint.
Such was our courtship: a daily series of conversations, spanning several months, in a café near Uzma’s London office, conducted in the hour between the end of her working day and our boarding the train home to Luton—a town 40 minutes away where we both still lived but where we couldn’t risk being seen together, its conservative Muslim community watchful for breaches in its code of relations, among its daughters and sisters especially. We’d talk out our future in a booth not so different from the one we now shared in the Sperl, and then we’d ride the train back to our discrete realities, chaste and quiet among the commuters, any of whom might have been spies for a regime that decreed our two worlds should and could not mix.
Because of that disconnect between the pact we were building around a Farringdon café table and the separation enforced on us by our hometown’s bigotry, we often felt that we were actors playing a part. A happy ending to our story seemed a distant possibility, and so we assumed the heavy costume of the star-crossed. Everything was weighted and precarious. It meant that every word counted. We convinced each other through talking that ours was a future worth gambling on, just as Jesse and Celine talk themselves into each other’s hearts. It’s another habit we share in common.
Those conversations are behind us now, and our words no longer carry the weight of prophecy. When we leaned towards each other across the Sperl marble, imaginary phones pressed to our faces, it was a caper and no more. We’d achieved the comfortable silence of the long in love.
On our last day in Vienna we had one remaining location to explore. The Zollamtssteg is an historic steel footbridge spanning the Wien river which connects the Landstrasse and Innere Stadt districts. Its appearance in Before Sunrise comes early and is brief; Jesse and Celine cross the bridge on first leaving the Westbahnhof to begin the walk that will change both their lives. Halfway across they meet two local men and ask them for advice on things to do and see in the city. The men are hobby actors who invite them to the play they’ll be appearing in that night, in which one of them has the part of a pantomime cow.
In reality the station and the bridge lie on opposite sides of the city, several kilometers apart; the filmmakers twist and condense both space and time in order to tell their story. We left the nearest U-Bahn station at Landstrasse as the temperature began to dip. The air crackled with the threat of snow. Spotting the distinctive green arches of the bridge in the distance, verdant as summer love against the sky’s cheerless grey, we hurried across the road. Only when we drew nearer did we see that the bridge had fallen into a disenchanting decline. The boardwalk had been replaced by concrete and the arches were covered with graffiti. The U-Bahn tracks clattered below us with the passing of a train, and below them the river flowed sluggishly, winter slowing the current and graining our view out to the high rises that abutted the mouth of the river. Suddenly we felt as bleak as the day appeared, and as we waited for somebody to come along who’d take our picture I wondered if this was Vienna’s intention: to restore to us a wider sense of realism, so that when we came later to reflect on the trip any moments of magic we’d enjoyed might be preserved and enhanced.
Or had it all been a mirage? Was I trapped between two seasons—the summer of the movie and the winter of my own life, a slow freeze that would descend as marriage expended its passion like a balloon inexorably deflating? How long would Vienna sustain us? We dug our hands into our pockets and stamped our feet. Home was calling us, and we had Christmas presents to wrap.
Presently a man approached us, making his way across the bridge, and I asked him if he’d be kind enough to photograph us. He agreed, neither reluctant nor enthusiastic.
We convinced each other through talking that ours was a future worth gambling on, just as Jesse and Celine talk themselves into each other’s hearts.“I suppose you know about the movie,” I said.
“Of course,” he said, with a reticent half-smile. It was cold and he probably had somewhere to be, and I couldn’t coax delight from him, even though we’d come to expect it of everyone we met in this mysterious city, a place we knew without discussion we’d return to someday, in the summertime. His tolerance was all we required of him. As lovers we are unique and we are commonplace. In this fact I find great consolation. I only ever wanted to be at large in a world that found my happiness unexceptional.
Six weeks home; Christmas has been and gone, and a New Year has begun. We’ve talked little of these experiences, preferring to absorb them into our story as skin acquires new color from the sun’s unselective gaze. Perhaps we’ll sit down and share exactly what Vienna meant to us once we’ve adjusted to the imperceptible ways in which it has enriched us. Meanwhile, our old routines press on. Uzma goes to work, in her new office in a different part of London. I stay at home and write, in the house we share in St. Albans, a small, safe city half an hour’s drive and a world away from the town in which we first met. In the evenings I walk the five minutes from home to the station to meet Uzma off the train. Sometimes I still get butterflies as I wait for her to emerge through the throng of people converging on the turnstiles. I’m never far from another insight into my good fortune.
On the way home tonight, waiting to cross the road outside the station, a sudden impulse seizes me and I take Uzma in my arms. We waltz on the pavement as the buses wheeze by, a light rain falling. Our steps are stiff with the bashfulness of new students versed only in the basics; my heart clenches at the sound of Uzma’s laughter; it’s as if we’ve only just met.
“Who needs music anyway?” a stranger comments in passing.
And he’s right: it’s the little romances inside us that make us all tick, whether the world can hear them or not.
