day seventeen: feeling swoony

Eating the end of a very crunchy peanut butter cookie, about to start on my mint tea in the window seat of Bakeshop in our Prague neighborhood. There's a big bowl of sugar lumps in front of me that look like tiny, snowy meatballs. A man next to me, a tourist, hides his camera low in his lap, picks it up when he thinks no one is looking and snaps photos in irregular heartbeats.

I used to collect sugar packets with my friend Amanda, who lived a few hours away from my hometown, in Detroit. We used to mail letters back and forth often. Each time I'd go to Big Boy, or Denny's, IHOP, whatever diner or restaurant, I'd grab a sugar packet and write where I was, with who, what time of day it was, on what occasion, that sort of thing. She did the same, and we ended up sending dozens of packets back and forth in letters. On a trip to my house a couple of years later, we brought all of our sugar packets together, read the notes we wrote on each one, and tore enough open until we had what we needed to make a cake.

So if you can imagine a sugar packet in your mind, let's say Sugar in the Raw with that nice brown color, here's what I'm going to send you:

Bakeshop, Prague
29 years, 357 days
All alone
Feeling swoony