Filling in the blanks

Going on vacation means many things to many people. For us, it's mainly observing, trying to understand. Mind you, I'm talking about a vacation, not the elevated concept of purposeful "travel," during which people do important things. What we do is utterly unimportant and selfish. Such is the nature of a vacation. Sitting on a terrace and sipping a latte macchiato for a whole hour, observing. A latte macchiato simply because you can't drag a whole hour out of an espresso. You can't drag a whole hour out of a latte macchiato either, you'll retort. Don't forget we're on vacation and just don't care.

We get an endless parade of incomplete stories, tiny fractions of a larger picture. The brain hates incomplete stories. On the pebble beach below, a young couple appears to stride towards a comfy spot on which to lie down and do nothing. Until they suddenly stop in their tracks. The woman's expressions and gesticulations are excellent. Language becomes totally superfluous, although we pick up some German sounds, and fill in the nationality blank with "Swiss."

The young man goes into a resigned surrender mode, probably out of experience, and wisdom.

We detect a five minute cycle, after which the gesticulation dies down and a response is forced out of the victim. He knows it's a trap, of course, but there are no options. He nods and the cycle restarts. After the third or fourth cycle, she undresses, puts on a bathing suit, kisses the victim on the mouth like a seagull would spear an unsuspecting sole meunière, dives into the sea, swims to Corsica and back before the sole meunière had time to blink, and lands on the pebbled spot. After which she immediately starts to gesticulate.

We can't stand the vacuum and start filling in the blanks. "They are probably staying at our hotel." That would answer all the questions. He booked the trip, she trusted him, and after five minutes in the hotel, they realized there's a railway track going straight through the middle of it.

There is a railway track going straight through the middle of it, but there's a railway track going straight through the entire village, which is a narrow band squeezed between the mountains and the sea, with more vertical real-estate than horizontal.

He grabs his phone, a call is made, and they leave the beach. His theory was they'd get used to the trains thundering through the room, hers was that she'd kill him before the end of the next night. "They're checking out."

We already had several days to check out his theory. And he was right. Luckily.

Of course, they could just have been arguing about his mother wanting to move in with them.