Page 46 - In Five Years

She speaks to him entirely in French, pointing out items on the menu and
discussing. I love watching her speak French. She’s so natural, so vibrant. She
tried to teach me once in our early twenties, but it just didn’t stick. They say that
languages come better to people who are right-brained, but I’m not so sure. I

think you need a certain looseness, a certain fluidity, to speak another language.
To take all the words in your brain and turn them over, one by one, like stones—

and find something else scrolled on the underside.
We spent four days together in Paris once. We were twenty-four. Bella was
there for the summer, taking an art course and falling in love with a waiter in the
Fourteenth. I came to visit. We stayed at her parents’ flat, right on Rue de Rivoli.

Bella hated it. “Tourist location,” she told me, although the whole city seemed
for the French, and the French alone.

We spent the entire four days on the outskirts. Eating dinner at cafés on the
fringes of Montmartre. During the day we wandered in and out of galleries in the
Marais. It was a magical trip, made all the more so by the fact that the only time

I’d been out of the country was a trip to London with my parents and David and
my annual pilgrimage to Turks and Caicos with his parents. This was something
else. Foreign, ancient, a different world. And Bella fit right in.

Maybe I should have felt disconnected from her. Here was this girl, my best
friend, who fit this faraway place like a hand to a glove. I didn’t, and yet she still
she took me with her. She was always taking me with her, wanting me to be a

part of her wide, open life. How could I feel anything but lucky?
“To get back to the prior discussion,” Bella says when the waiter is gone. “I
think sacrifice is in direct opposition to manifestation. If you want your dreams

you should look for abundance, not scarcity.”
I take a sip of coffee. Bella lives in a world I do not understand, populated by
phrases and philosophies that apply only to people like her. People, maybe, who

do not yet know tragedy. No one who has lost a sibling at twelve can say with a
straight face: everything happens for a reason.
“Let’s agree to disagree,” I tell her. “It has been too long since I’ve seen you.

I want to be bored senseless hearing all about Jacques.”
She smiles. It sneaks up her cheeks until it’s practically at her ears.
“What?”