Should I be concentrating harder on the days of my life?

My mind has been running up and down the number of days left on holiday, counting them up and down, up and down, like fingers over piano keys. I started with an incredibly luxurious 15, so that my hands could stretch out over two whole scales.

15 whole days of holiday ahead of me! That felt like forever. I don’t plan much and have no idea how to send a calendar invite, and usually I cannot imagine what will actually be happening in 15 days time, so on holiday with 15 days ahead of me, I let my mind relax into the luxury of knowing there were a lot of days, like snuggling up in a big soft blanket. I swam in glittering blue sea and bought Dolly a Breton top, but with red stripes rather than blue, and ate some whelks, which were rubbery and huge and surprisingly compelling but put Lester off his pasta, and chose a different eclair every morning before breakfast, and read a book every day or two, and brushed sand from cool sheets each night, and picked lavender because it completely altered the plain kitchen table, and cried at Utah beach thinking of soldiers from Pennsylvania and Delaware crashing through the waves, and pushed cornichons into salami baguettes and wandered around a market with a basket buying olives and tomatoes and the best cookies Evangeline says she has ever eaten, and wished I still drank alcohol so that I could buy a bottle of Breton cider to drink cold and sweet with the mussels we ate for supper while also feeling quietly jubilant that I’ll have been sober for five years in late August, and held Lester’s hand as we watched fish jumping before he tried the camera I gave him for his birthday and ate blackberries on a bike trip and held shells and sea glass in my palm as the tide went out. I did a lot of good things, and every morning, before any of these things happened, I walked to a local cafe for a tiny cup of cafe au lait with Pete.

On that first morning, when many days lay ahead of us, there was a woman with a very short fringe and long brown hair the colour of a polished chestnut, sitting a few seats away from us. She wore double denim and immediately made me want to wear that too, and as Pete chatted to me, I watched her from the corner of my eye while nodding and agreeing with him, responding to his questions while observing her too, as there was something compelling about her. I could not stop looking at her. She smoked a lot, roll ups, but not in a desperate way. In a cool way, of course, in her double denim. After she finished her coffee, a man approached her, holding the hands of two little children, who must have been twins, who both had glossy brown hair like hers. These were her children, so clear from the way their small faces lit up and they waved their arms when they saw her. The man stopped with these two little girls - who both wore double denim like her, but in a faded colour and with thin stripes on their tiny dungarees - and the two girls took turns to stand on the chair beside her as she gave them both pieces of croissant and looked at them affectionately. She smoothed the girls hair as she rearranged their little fringes and stroked their little cheeks. She and the man talked in a warm way as they both drank small cups of coffee. Then the man took the two little girl’s hands, and said something to the woman with their faces quite close where they clearly wanted them to be, before the man walked up the road with his daughters, leaving her in the cafe, to roll another cigarette, looking out from the yellow and black striped chair, to the small square, dwarfed a bit by a big church, where the doors were almost always open and you could sometimes hear loud music from an organ playing, and see candles flickering in the inner darkness. The woman continued to smoke.

“How does she do that?” I asked Pete. “How does she create a life like that?”