“Perhaps you’ll meet a French prince…” part 1

The weather was getting warmer with each passing day. Although she had lived off in Arizona during her college years, the summer heat waves of San Francisco exhausted her. There were no fog clouds over the hills, no cool ocean breeze through the streets. At the park, clusters of people huddled under the shade while across the street a line for the local ice cream store spilled onto the sidewalk and around the corner.

Out on the streets there were still people biking around town with their backpacks strapped tightly to their backs, their right pant leg hiked just below their knee. Dogs on their leashes had their tongues lolling outside their mouths hoping to cool down just a bit. Friendly chatter wafted in through the open window from below and she couldn’t help but overhear their plans for a barbeque next Friday and she smiled

And inside, Connie looked around. All around her were boxes. Boxes of clothes. Boxes of books. Boxes of pictures and albums and even a box of stuffed animals. Her life all summed up into a number of boxes, of all different sizes. The stories and experiences she had collected over the past two years were now packed securely in the boxes that littered room. In one box held the dozens of bills and paperwork and files that had accumulated over the months. Her work papers and research papers and even a small folder of successful recipes neatly filled one box.

In another box was the stuffed Donald Duck doll (who looked more like an egg than Donald Duck himself) that she had gotten on a long weekend road-trip down to LA where she and her fellow companions reaffirmed her unnatural affinity to eat anything and everything within a small window of time.