Espresso Love: Fragments

Turnaround 2

If I had to remember something, anything at all, it would be my dead pet parakeet. I had dreamed of it the other night, two days ago. I had forgotten all about it for a long time, but it came back and bit me in the ear.

Then the morning immediately after, when I had woken up and realized my ear was perfectly fine, I went cycling with her on the back of my bike to see the flowers out at the Kurata farm. There were no parakeets there.

It was a warm, humid day. The kind of day where you could almost suffocate in the sun but it was also the kind of day you couldn't remain indoors because the insects were chiming so loudly.

Now apparently flowers weren't exactly her kind of thing - she was quite allergic. But she wanted to go anyway to my surprise. With my sleeves rolled up, I sweated and panted while she laughed at my red face and tried to hold on tight for dear life. We had popped a bottle of Coke and shared it along the way. Half an hour later, we found ourselves picking our way through a sea of sunflowers. Sunflowers tend to be intimidating like big men with uniformly blank faces and hats. There was no way I could give her one of these sunflowers so I bought her some late-blooming hydrangea and she sneezed in my face.

Mr. Kurata, this stooped over elderly man, was sitting on his porch as we went up to him on our way back from the storefront to say hi. I had met him on a school field trip and he would always be playing some Mozart or something from the back of his house. But he had never met her. He made a comment at first glance - I couldn't recall what it had been exactly - but it was about her looking like a very peculiar flower he had once seen. Only once. A rare species. Something that ought to never wither away in the wind. I agreed.