Two weeks ago I discovered that one of my favourite festivals -  UNFINISHED - had a challenge named “Tell us your UNFINISHED Love Story!”.

The brief was this one:

We’re looking for a real love story from your own life — happy or sad, capturing a moment or a lifetime, unfinished or not. On the UNFINISHED stage, we seek to read the funniest and heart-wrenching entries we receive.

Your story must be short, true, and unpublished.

All stories will be read and selected by Daniel Jones, Editor of Modern Love in the New York Times.

I took the challenge, they did not pick me, but I decided that my short story needs to be published, so I will post it on my blog. It has been a long time since I have not posted anything on my Storyteller section, so here it is. Enjoy it!

***

It was a warm September day in Paris and I was returning from Tour Eiffel with my 11 year old son, happy and grateful for sharing another first time experience with him. My thoughts were bouncing between that present moment and the future when he would remember the feeling of stepping on the glass floor of the Tower, a little bit curious, a little bit frightened.

I was walking behing my son when I started smiling to a 40 something (maybe 50, because French men look so good that you never guess their actual age). I have no idea why I smiled, I do not remember how he looked like, I only recall he was chic, something that I rarely see in men of Bucharest. He looked a little bit surprised with my smiling, but he smiled back, and his entire face was radiating warmth and expectation. He was most probably wondering just like me what he could do with that unexpected encounter. We were both vacuumed in that smile, overwhelmed by its simple yet hard to decipher meaning, but unknowledgable of any practical move that would decode it into the next chapter. I moved further, following my son, he moved behind me, following his way. After couple of meters I turned back my head only to realise that he turned his in the very same moment. We crossed our looks once more, but we were now too far for me to see if he was still smiling. I was. That brief crossing of our lives, smiles and eyes stayed with me long after. I took the metro from Invalides to Louvre and afterwards to Bonne Nouvelle, where both my son and I enyoyed visiting and tasting the exhibits of The Chocolate museum. The next day, on our flight back home, I took my agenda and journaled my previous one, calling it one of the best days of my life. Having Tour Eiffel and The Chocolate museum and the whole Paris as a background for a mom-son trip was more than enough to call it one of the best days. But it was that unfinished scene that made it somehow magical. The possibility of love. It was like a story that could have started, but has not found its plot yet. I have not travelled to Paris since then, I would only return when time would be ready to pick me from that smile to shaking hands. Bonjour.