If You'll Be My Body-Guard

The corner of her bottom lip was swollen and gray. It was sometime in the afternoon when she woke to find a thin gray cover of sky over the Grande Roue. Standing now, she shakes her head and wags her cheeks on her face wondering wha-...why? The immediacy of being awake in the afternoon in public impels her to do something, but being senseless as she was at the moment, all she could bear to do was to fumble hands in her pockets, and press her tongue to the welt on her mouth.
So often when we wake to find the world a stranger we fashion from our memories an excuse or explanation and from our habits some solution. We could call it a shame that this one had not the faculty at the time to remember of herself as a smaller child, sick to the stomach at the Taj Mahal and the photo taken of her frowning with arms barred across her chest, uncomfortable and angry as one could expect. Such a memory might have granted her the timely use of a tool well within her repertoire for exactly such encounters as these.

Alas, as she scanned the sky and scenery, the people strolling past her, and those vending hot wine, she happily found her gloves and hastily put them on for as well as she could not provide a reason for her being there, she also could not summon a reason for her to be anywhere else and away from need of logic, she knew that she was cold.
Without the need and indeed the capacity for reasoning, left in quite this state of desolation and fumbling as all she could do in her pockets, she produced a few coins and started towards the man with the vin chaud. Smiling at the man's bright white face, she let the coins clatter on the counter of his booth and asked with shrugging shoulders for a small cupful. His skin sagged heavily from his eyes that his smile was such relief, and she coughed back laughter, but the vinchaudman took the coins, and said to her, "Donc et voila, it's cold today! Wine...biensure c'est comme ca...you sleep...!" His meaning muddled and flung at her so violently and with such beneficence, she seemed to need to blink several times to see clearly that he was presenting her with her cup and some change. With a thank you genuine and meek, she walked away. Without having sipped yet, she sat down knowing that he was a good man and that it was good wine.
Simply enough, she found herself soon warm, and again watching the baskets of the wheel swept smoothly, swiftly up into the cold. Speakers stand embedded in the streetlamps showering "vive le vent" down upon the ramblers, the words themselves lost upon the girl; the tune, more powerful, unlocked nonspecific memories of cheerfulness, the feeling itself. Being alone as she was, blank as she admittedly was even with the reemergence of some memory, self-hood and context, and being also happy, she began to sing quietly to herself. First it was the American version of "vive le vent," but halfway through, the assertion of Paul Simon's "you can call me Al," was too strong to resist even if she had had reason to. The song made her laugh even without specifically remembering that time in West Virginia.
The quiet self-soothing of singing gave way to a quiet conversation just of her own. Someone's passing glance lingered longer than happenstance, and realized to the girl the visibility of her lips' movement, the impression it gives, and, as in a forced farewell, how happy it had made her to speak aloud to herself. "What lovely company, I am," she said as in finale, and wiped the grin from her face with the last sip of hot wine.
Warm, happy, and in Paris; no one could say she was lost. Not knowing for sure if she was a smoker, she set out for a cigarette, or a cigar, whichever came first, because, she said, "I might be."