A Small Sun No One Noticed

||. Fragments from the Otherwise. | • | October 22nd .||

Tori Amos breathes Thank You in my ear, her voice turning Zeppelin’s prayer into something more mortal, more interior. It’s late—or early, I can’t tell anymore—& I should be asleep, but I’m staring at a photograph—the tiny table we claimed for ourselves at The European, that late summer eve. White linen, two glasses with lemon slices drowned in their own reflection, a tea light cupped in amber glass. Shadows of the tableware fall long, the room a planet lit by candle & residue. The photograph holds the gravity of that night without realising it—the afterlife of an evening, still warm in the hands but already slipping toward distance.

We had shared food the way old friends share confession—slowly, with small silences folded between. The tablecloth was marked with wine & oil, a napkin streaked red—human evidence that ruins perfection but makes it believable. The old-school Italian waiters—dark-eyed, unhurried—charmed everyone with a darling & a gentle touch on the shoulder as they attended to us, moving with the grace of people who’ve poured a thousand nights like ours, as if time itself had taught them how to clear a table without breaking the spell. Our words & laughter drifted into the restaurant’s gentle din. I remember thinking the candlelight knew too much, the way it bent toward the part of your face I liked to hold my skin against.

In that dim warmth, everything felt both heightened & dissolving. The sparkling water fizzed like an afterthought. We had been three, cramped close, the table contracting around each small pause, drawing us nearer to the small orbit of what wasn’t being said. The photograph doesn’t capture the scent—the citrus peel, the heat of us touching beneath the table, the faint smoke of charred bread, the ghost of her perfume that lingered on my neck after our embrace. It doesn’t capture weight of knowing something is ending, though even the camera must have sensed it.

The mandarin you gave me remains in the frame, absurd & devotional, its bright skin burnished against the tablecloth—a small sun no one noticed. I meant to take it, truly. But if I’m honest, I wanted it to stay—to keep its orange silence at the centre of that night. To leave something of us behind that wasn’t speech. Every shared meal deserves a relic.

Tori draws mountains crumble to the sea into something almost unbearable in its resonance. Gratitude is always tinged with departure. I close the photograph, & imagine the waiter folding the linen over the stain, carrying night away in his arms.

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