Un coup de foudre
To the guy who brought colours back to my heart
I was only eight years old when the French teacher decided to introduce my class to this phenomenon.
“Un coup de foudre!”
She wrote the expression on the black board and underlined it twice.
“It’s like ‘love at first sight’, you know, but even more than that. It’s when you just go about your day, and the whole world suddenly goes upside down without leaving you any time to prepare. And the main reason for the world going upside down? He or she smiled at you.”
I was confused. The photo in front of me was showing a bolt of lightning, so the being the good nerd that I was, I had to challenge her and correct the description. I knew nothing about love but I knew everything about storms.
“I don’t think that’s right. The image is of a bolt of lightning… not falling in love. That’s not even similar. Lightning happens when there are opposite charges within the thunderstorm cloud or between opposite charges in the cloud and on the ground,” I was reciting what my dad taught me.
She burst out laughing.
“Ah, tu vas voir — you’ll see these ‘opposite charges’ one day!”
And while this may sound insanely inappropriate to anyone in teaching nowadays…
