Giving...

A young couple are walking arm in arm on a glorious and lazy summer afternoon. As he speaks, he turns his head slightly to catch her reaction. She laughs and presses her cheek against his shoulder. She tilts her head up to meet his smile. Their eyes and not their necks do most of the work.

The sign above the cafe behind them reads "Pastais de Belem".

They are both in their late twenties, he stands at a proud six foot and two inches tall, well set, sensibly muscular with iconically Italian-American features and a deep brown and passionate gaze. She is slender, unreasonably attractive, Dutch with impecable English. They are the perfect couple, madly in love and the whole world madly in love with them. Beneath their perfect skin, of course, they are made of messy and falable biological material: blood and bone and sweat and shit. Hungry minds feed their greedy bellies.

As they walk past the entrance to the Pastais de Balem, an elderly woman leaves, stopping in the doorway for a second as she fastens the clasp of her purse. The opening door draws an aromatic flood of pastel de nata onto the street. Her feet stop walking and he is suprised, caught off guard, his body forced around by momentum, the falcrum of their linked arms and certain amount of curiosity. He faces her. His attention quickly pulls her into focus, but she does not meet him. Her gaze is fixed on a place and a time that no longer exist. She breaths deeply.

Another man, beautiful in his own way, once brought her to this place. He was much more in love with her than she ever was with him, but his love and his radiance led her to deny this for a long time. The same things led him to ignore it. Back when she was a small bundle of nervous smiles and unpublished photographs, barely out of her teens, he had called in favours and established new ones, pulled hours out of nowhere to bring her success into his own. His belief in her, and his hard work, had created this world that she now lived in. This confident smile, this dream of a life, this perfect honeymoon.

And when his drunken one-night-stand with a collegue at a christmas party had finally given her the excuse to finally feel what she had always felt, she had cried herself to sleep on his chest for twenty-seven nights before packing her bags. He had remained more or less motionless, emotionless for the whole period, stroking her hair and staring at the ceiling.

The Dutch girl's neck does all of the work as it lifts her eyes to meet the intrigue of the Italian-American man. She tells him that she loves him, and as she leads them into walking on, she momentarilly glances at the pastel de nata in the window, before fixing her eyes firmly on the horizon that faces them now.