“(Amélie) cultivates a taste for small pleasures: dipping her hand into sacks of grain… cracking créme brulée with a teaspoon… and skipping stones at St. Marin’s Canal.”
I first watched Amélie (a 2002 French film) when I was 14, and loved how the small things were taken into consideration. This line just summed it up for me: sometimes all one needs to be happy is to plunge a hand into a sack of grain and feel the small pieces trickle over skin, or to watch a dessert splinter delicately as it’s broken by a teaspoon. I tried to explain this to Mum at the time: she looked confused, and had her ‘Right…whatever you say…’ expression on, so I stopped saying anything for the rest of the film.
I’d forgotten about this until yesterday, when Cat and I were talking about Amélie. I wonder now if Amélie has Aspie traits, although it could’ve just been her bizarre upbringing that made her ‘odd’. I added that it felt great to pour grain/rice/raw broken pasta over hands too, to feel it run between fingers. My brother does that a lot: he shreds raw pasta into tiny pieces, then lets it drop slowly from his hands into a tray. Sometimes I put my hands into the pasta flow: for the two seconds or so before he pushes my hands away for being in his personal space, it feels amazing in a way that’s difficult to describe. (Except when the pasta touches my nails: that feels horrible, as though they’re being scratched.)
In a way, I’d forgotten how good things like this feel: I’ve tried to be ‘normal’ and in doing so, have stopped doing these. Now I’m tempted to go back to doing things like this: okay, so a lot of people might not understand what pleasure I get from pouring rice grains over my hands, but since it does no harm, why shouldn’t I?
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