Your Sunday Sip
Vienna creeps up on you. The first time I met her, she was meticulously well-mannered, poised, appropriate, concealed to the collar bones in ivory tulle that strangled her waist, the kind of city that smacks you on the wrist with a baton for not following cues. Or rewards you, slowly and delicately, for behaving, making you dart around frantically when she disappears again, wondering how you can earn another silky caress.
I had never seen such a limpid sky like the one she painted me the day I arrived, as if she had scooped up an open can of the Tiffany blue paint she splattered on the roofs and spun around in a circle, her slender arms stretched out in front of her chest, her pearl-white teeth bared in a frenetic smile, her face pointing toward the sun as if the ground had dug its fingers into her ankle-length hair and pulled her head back. At 12:00 pm on a Friday in May, the black backpack swishing side to side against my caramel leather jacket that hadn’t fit in my suitcase was the loudest thing inside the Vienna International Airport; my suitcase glided over the sterile, white floor like a bar of wet soap, couples interlaced fingers and whispered, lone travelers with white spheres in their ears delicately flipped pages, rosy-cheeked children chewed magenta berries instead of pulverizing potato chips, the crisp wind barely made a swoosh when the automatic doors opened up to the street.
The drive in the silver Mercedes-Benz sedan consisted of several glances through the rearview mirror - not cold, but alert - and house music that softly played on the speakers and bounced off the moon grey leather interior that smelled ever so slightly of violets, as if I were at the cocktail hour before Vienna’s grand entrance. Yawning and staring out the window to prevent my eyes from being imprisoned by the driver’s again, I caught a flicker of warmth in this snow globe of a city. My spine contorted toward the road behind me as my palms pressed into the headrest of my seat, my chestnut brown eyes glued to a pedestrian signal with two stick figures holding hands and a small heart floating between their heads.
“Stop the car.”
The only moment she stopped watching me, pretending not to hear me.
“Stop the car. I need to cross the street.”
“We’re still 27 minutes away,” she said, replacing her Ws with her Vs.
I didn’t care where I was off to in that moment, nor how near or far I was. I was going to cross that street. Untwisting my spine vertebrae by vertebrae, I aimed my eyes forward, rolled my shoulders back, and stabbed her straight in the eyes with a glare that would have killed her all over again.
So there I was, backpack behind my shoulders, suitcase to my left, enamored stick figures to my right. Aside from the gentle beeping of the signal, all I could hear were my even breaths; not even the dusty wheels of my metallic pink suitcase groaned, for the asphalt under me was as smooth as the Formula 1 racetrack I accidentally walked onto in Monte Carlo a month prior. Despite the lack of life around me, I felt watched by the doors, the windows, the roofs; even the enamored stick figures seemed to look at me and back at each other, as if to quietly indicate the presence of something that didn’t belong, that would reveal their true nature, holding a finger to their lips, reminding each other to remain silent.
