It’s like every day at the Sacre Coeur. In between the tourists, professional womanizers are stalking ladies from all over the world, and on Place Saint Pierre men from the Senegal are selling plastic toys from China to Americans and Japanese, while others try to snatch the wallets from unwary foreign visitors. The sun is shining, and from the top of the stairs in front of the cathedral you can see the skyscrapers of La Defense.

Image by Jen Laubscher

There is one really beautiful woman among all those people. With long, shining red hair; and wearing only black. Black coat, black trousers, black sneakers. Apparently she’s alone, as three of the womanizers try to chat her up and no Rugby-playing boyfriend appears to beat them to pulp. But she keeps her appearance, and after a while the men leave her in peace, so she can take some pictures of Paris. If someone talked to her now, not acting as crude as the locals and maybe showing some wit, and as it’s a beautiful winters day in Paris, this might actually work. It could even be like in the movies. Stranger meets stranger in Paris, she’s from Vancouver and he’s from Dortmund, but they like each other and laugh about the same jokes, so they decide to have a coffee, and dinner later. It’s the evening of Valentines Day in the City of Lights, and later that night they sleep with each other in the small hotel at Montmatre were he is staying, where there’s PVC flooring in the room and it reeks of disinfectant. The day after her plane leaves from Charles-de-Gaulle, and his train is departing from Gare du Nord. Whatever happens next, if they make plans and will meet again, and in the end he moves from Germany to Canada; or if they never see each other again – those hours in Paris will always seem like a daydream, one of those strange but beautiful occurrences that life has in store, sometimes.

I ask her for a lighter, in English, and she answers in English. She looks in my face, her blue eyes wide open, looking interested. It seems she’s waiting for me to say something. But I don’t know what, so I thank her and go down the stairs towards the merry-go-round.

That evening I bought the cheapest red wine I could get, one with a plastic screw top.