The French probably have a word that means ‘a sudden and stupidly powerful infatuation for a person you’ll never in a thousand years meet’. Whatever that word is (and really, the French ought to share it with the rest of us), that’s what I feel looking at this photograph.

I wonder what she’s looking at on her wee little netbook. Is she reading the news? Doing homework? I do hope she’s not working on a financial spreadsheet–that would break my heart. She’s not shopping for shoes, that’s a certainty. She looks a wee bit too dispirited to be shopping.

And that, I think, more than anything is why I’m feeling whatever that French word might be. I want this woman I’ll never meet to be happy–at least for a while. I want her to smile and be less serious. I want to tell her, “Wendy, Wendy, when you are sleeping in your silly bed you might be flying about with me saying funny things to the stars.”

But she’s not Wendy and I’m not Peter Pan (I can sew my own shadow back on, thank you very much), and sometimes the world is shaped in such a way that it’s proper and appropriate to sit in a coffee shop window and be a little sad. Sometimes a little melancholy is exactly what we need. There are times in our lives when we should not be flying about, saying funny things to stars.

The French probably have a word for that too. They have all the best words, the French.