Minervaplein Sunday

Another Sunday escapes the trap of his spider web at Minervaplein. While so many managed to enjoy the guilty pleasure of doing absolutely nothing; he managed to suffer gingerly about not doing enough. This constant preoccupation with productivity on his leisure time was one of his many, less obvious, but nonetheless, equally enchanting idiosyncrasies. Counting cheese and bread slices was another one.

Superficially one might dismiss with the blink of an eye this handsome, seemingly average young man. He is the guy you bump into in the train or supermarket and you respond with an automatic "pardon me" or "so sorry" without remembering a single thing about him two seconds later. He was that guy who asked for the time and you replied absentmindedly with a polite, mechanical smile. He was your brother's nice looking friend, you exchanged pleasantries a couple of times, but you were not sure of even his name. He was his worst critic and would probably agree on all counts.

But those lucky enough to invest an extra second, to notice for more than an instant, the reward was infinite, the memory: eternal and comforting. The unassuming creaminess of the liquid cinnamon of his eyes, the impossibly tempting strawberry that was his mouth. A cruel mirage one treasures and retreats to on a lonely, warm, Pacific evening.

His beautiful long fingers, guardians of his equally horrible handwriting. Graceful dancing legs of a skillful, weaving spider with a pearly head; expertly knitting a dream like web. Then it was obvious that he was far from average and could never be ordinary, no matter what he said, his modesty would never allow him to agree.

Another Sunday escapes the trap of his spider web at Minervaplein. In his bedroom he looks out the window briefly before finishing the note he was writing her:

So last night there was the moon, I saw it: and Minervaplein becomes sort of like a living room with soft light. The sounds from the open‑air concert on the Museumplein seemed to come from a radio set in the corner of Minervaplein....

Visions of shorter sentences and “less-associations” in his writing (as he called them) forced his perfect strawberries to melt into an unnaturally intoxicating wine, a smile that one could get drunk on. How was he to know that when those lines he authored flew across the sea like drunken butterflies, and elegantly landed on her like doves one conjures up in the hands of gitanas dancing bulerías; it was inevitable that he, her forbidden, unreachable, and eternal muse, work his magic again. She had no visions of shorter sentences or less associations; he had bewitchingly transported her to his world.

What would the new week bring him? Perhaps he should have gone to bed earlier Saturday night but he watched a movie instead; and somewhere in it, he noticed a face. One that fleetingly reminded him of someone he knew. Perhaps a past liaison, a face in a crowd, a stranger in a train? It stirred a faint, distant memory but his mind came back to his Minervaplein Sunday: The soccer game where at least this time, he didn’t get a black eye but didn’t emerge victorious either. He was not in the mood for tango as a consequence and definitely not in the mood for any more productivity. Perhaps succumbing to the verses of a light, predictable novel would shoo away any possibilities of heavy dreaming of someone else.

She would have told him it was the intention that was important, but he would find no comfort in her words. Perhaps a back rub and a hot bath would be more productive and beneficial to him as this Minervaplein Sunday escaped his web, and would soon be nothing more than a forgotten memory.