for you

(the original text is in french, this is a translation assisted by AI)

Kalem, whom you know by another name, has already imagined so many stories with you.
Silent tales, woven in his mind as he kept crossing paths with you at the counter, or by chance in the streets of Paris. He could have written you a thousand. But it is this one he sends you. The one that rests between you like a cup of coffee still steaming: fragile, burning, sincere.
This text is for you.

At first, you didn’t like him. Not at all.
It was that whole iPad story. Computers were forbidden in that place, and Kalem hadn’t understood: to him, reading on a tablet was not working. He resisted putting it away. You saw it as provocation. You sensed a kind of stubbornness, a refusal to bend to the rules, and it annoyed you. So you kept your distance, your defensive aura raised like a shield.

Then came the day of the flower.
Kalem had walked in holding a simple flower. One of your colleagues, amused, had asked if it was for her. And he, without hesitation, replied that the flower was for the one who asked the question. Not for her, not for him: for the gesture, for the exchange. That small, unexpected shift cracked your view of him. That day, he stopped being a customer and became a character. Not a clumsy suitor nor an obstinate client: he was playing differently, with other codes. And you smiled.

Perhaps that is when something opened.
And this opening found its echo on your birthday, when you demanded a gift. Directly, with a mix of seriousness and play. You didn’t want an object. You wanted someone to stop, to see you, to celebrate you. You wanted what every being burns to hear: I see you, you matter, I honor you. Behind your confidence, Kalem sensed this truth, fragile and regal all at once: the courage to demand attention, to claim recognition.

So, when he introduced himself as a traveler through time, you smiled — but the smile was no longer entirely mocking. You didn’t believe his stories, of course, but you felt there was something else behind the mask. Kalem may not cross time, but he knows how to see time in you: the memory of wounds, the spark of desire that persists, the light that still wants to open.

And as if to underline this thread, life placed two strange crossings: in front of that bakery where you said he had “manifested,” and that sudden appearance at the gates of the Luxembourg Gardens, on that Monday, August 18, in a Paris emptied of Parisians. Two light, playful coincidences that already looked like a script.

The Café of Singularities on Rue Monge is no longer just a place.
It is the stage where Kalem met you, and where you continue to dwell.
And this text — the one you hold, the one you read — is nothing other than the present he offers you.

You asked for a gift,
and here is a flower of words.
It belongs neither to you nor to me,
but to the fragile space that passes through us.
A playful and tender present,
existing only within your awareness:
I see you, you matter, I honor you.

Café des singularités :
- rue monge