Beautiful Cynicism III

Like slipping into an old sweater, the weight of my memories and experience envelope me and I’m no longer an observer taking in my surroundings, but an actor in an improv show in which I’m the star. It’s not just that the sights and sounds are familiar to me; I’m actively re-immersed in this life. This life, which is substantively different from that life over there.

I look around and see the silhouettes of sleeping giants – the land masses that form the coastal mountain range unevenly rising from the water, forming the undulating horizon that is so natural to me. Rolling hills shrouded in low-lying wisps of cloud and fog. It’s beautiful, mysterious, predictable, familiar, magical. It is scenery that has at once retained both its banality and its novelty.

Je ne vois plus d’oiseaux, ni du soleil, depuis ma poste dans ce couloir. Un couloir baigné de lumière fluorescente. Je me suis installée à la place désigné au plein milieu du couloir. D’ici je vois tout, bien qu’il n’y a rien à voir. Il n’y a personne, sauf quelques professeurs ennuyés et quelques gardiens errants. Et la jeune dame qui fait le tour du campus. Elle se promène partout et nulle part, ses mains remplies de papiers, ses pas plein d’urgence. Elle a l’air importante. Est-elle importante? Personne ne le sait. Mais on la voit marcher, marcher sans cesse. J’attends. Je passe des heures en attente. De quoi, me demande-t-on? Un peu d’activité. Sinon, je me contenterai d’une petite geste ou d’un sourire gentil.

Il y a des gens qui éclatent de lumière, dans lesquels la lumière bouge, danse, scintille. Des âmes radieuses. Voilà un garçon. Ses yeux sont bleus, mais pas le bleu riche de l’été – plutôt le bleu pâle de l’hiver: limpide, lumineux. Il y a un clarté presque effrayant dans ses yeux, tel que son regard est sérieux. Pourtant, ils sont plein de curiosité et de douceur, ces yeux. Ils révèlent une fragilité et une tendresse peu communs. Quand il vient m’interroger, il me regarde avec une intensité dévastatrice. Pendant ces instants, son regard m’appartient. Pendant ces instants, toute son attention m’appartient. Pendant ces instants, je ne peux regarder qu’à lui, ne peux me concentrer que sur lui. Un garçon, un étranger. Mais pendant ces instants, il m’appartient, et je lui appartient. La durée d’une conversation, la durée d’une éternité: c’est pareil.

On se demande ce qu’il y a d’important dans la vie. Et on répond par la bouche: l’amour, la famille, la charité. Puis on répond par nos actions: une piscine, une villa en Espagne, une télévision à haute définition. Qu’est-ce qu’il y a d’important? Le vivant, certainement. La mort aussi.

As I weaved my way through the crowds I observed my fellow consumers. There were happy couples, teenagers with attitude, elderly ladies badgering their grown sons, harried-looking mums with tots in tow. I moved among them effortlessly, never really feeling a part of it all. I think I may have actually been smiling.
My family gathers together on Christmas Day, but remains within each smaller immediate family unit for Christmas Eve. I realised that this will be the first Christmas Eve that I spend alone in nearly a decade, my family unit having been decreased from a cozy two to a solitary one. As I walked across the bus loop to the street, I thought of the ghosts of Christmases past, and thought for a moment that I had become one. I felt unmistakably ‘of the past’, as though a fraction of a moment from some indistinct winter long gone had been displaced to the present day. Maybe it was the way the light hit the ice on the pavement, or the way the snow smelled as it fell on my face, but I was suddenly utterly convinced that I was about to hop on a westbound bus and head for my grandparents’ house, which I called home, and where I would find my Baba hard at work canning something or other in the kitchen, whilst my Dzizi dozed on the chesterfield while a football game played loudly on the TV. Life is so very different now.

Instead, I headed east, taking the bus downtown. Seeing the traffic snarl at The Bay, and knowing I was armed with the appropriate fuzzy winter accoutrements and a pocketful of music, I decided to walk the rest of the way home. Blocked streets gave way to deserted, if slippery, sidewalks, and I walked uninterrupted all the way to the village. The falling snow glowed green by the light of the giant Christmas tree at Great-West Life; as I stepped on to Osborne Bridge I looked down at the icy river and noticed that someone had made a snow angel right on the riverbank. Ten years in and these Winnipeg winters still feel magical. After awhile it gets tedious, and I complain as loudly as anyone else about the bitterly cold winds – but early on in the season I’m still in awe by the sheer preposterousness of the snow’s whiteness, the water’s iciness, the wind’s sting. In some ways I’m glad this place still doesn’t feel like home, because I think if it did, I’d lose that sense of wonder.

In the village, three strapping young lads walking just ahead of me started a snowball fight; when one errant sphere nearly hit me, all three stopped to apologise profusely. So many perfectly lovely human beings, so many handsome men… yet we tend to think only of those who show no interest in us, or who happen to be the “ones that got away”. Are we really that vain? Is it really all about winning after all? Or are we just all emotional masochists at heart?

Weeks slip by, unnoticed: time refuses to stand still. I’ve always been acutely aware of the passage of time, yet this doesn’t seem to make me immune to the shock of the realisation that a stretch of time has suddenly passed without fanfare. It’s been weeks since I’ve posted, though I’ve been writing almost daily. Nothing fit for public consumption – and I do use the term ‘public’ rather loosely. The past month has been a frenzy of work-related diversions, little bursts of productive energy punctuated by long walks, endless music, and not enough sleep.

I’ve recently fallen into a bit of a musical memory hole, dusting off albums that I haven’t listened to in years. Each song calls forth a memory of a time, a place, a glance, a touch, a scent. It’s odd how seemingly insignificant remembrances can appear to us, so achingly real that we feel them in our very core. A re-experiencing of the past? Or is it just an illusion of the past? When it’s that vivid, I swear that I’m re-feeling my past… but how can that be? Isn’t it really my past as viewed through the lens of the present? But then how can it seem to feel so authentic?

The city is once again covered in an ever-thickening blanket of snow, returning it to its virgin state. The trash carelessly littering the sidewalks and back alleys, the small oil spills and puddles, the crosses laid at intersections where lives were lost: all have been covered completely now. It’s this city’s endless second chance; a chance to start over once again.

For the past several years, I spent nearly every day in a particular neighbourhood in the city. Six months ago, my reason for being there disappeared, and I too disappeared from the neighbourhood. Well, technically, anyway; I’m still in the area twice a week to visit my grandparents, but I never go beyond their home. Further north I had not ventured – until yesterday.

It’s funny; what we do and who we know determines which neighbourhoods we frequent. Any city’s citizens are rarely intimately familiar with every area, every quarter, every street. We have our comfort zones – where we live, where we work, where our favourite haunts are – and we rarely, if ever, leave them. Sitting on the bus yesterday evening riding down Main Street, everything felt normal, banal – until I reached the frontier: the street past which I have rarely gone in the past six months. I felt something shift inside me, a change in my consciousness that was palpable. As the bus continued on its route, I felt myself slipping into a time warp. Looking out the window at these streets which had once been so familiar to me, so quotidian, I suddenly felt foreign and strange. I recognised those streets, I remembered them; I could hear them telling me their stories, stories that I already knew but hadn’t heard in a long time. For the first time in quite awhile, I felt nostalgic.
The bus turned, and we went from one neighbourhood to another. The sun was beginning to set; there was a faint smell of smoke in the air from the odd backyard fire pit. I knew that the last time I had been on that street, in that area, was months ago, in another life. Something totally unprovocative, unremarkable: the fodder of everyday life. And yet yesterday it felt so powerful, almost overwhelming. For the first time in quite awhile, I felt sad.

I do not lead an empty life. I love the people in my life; I enjoy my job; I’m not lacking in passions or things to do or places to go; I’m feeling settled in my soul. I’m relatively happy. And yet, something has been missing. It’s been quietly gnawing on me for awhile. I hadn’t been able to put my finger on what, exactly, has been bothering me – until last night. I got off the bus one stop too late, and had to walk awhile; it was then that it dawned on me. Something so simple and cliched as to be embarrassing to admit: I feel purpose-less. Not necessarily lacking in goals or ambitions; but in a sense of building towards something.

I spent most of my twenties building towards something: building a life in a city in which I hadn’t counted on staying for long, building a life with someone. Relationships are always complicated. It wasn’t just him; I thought about all the people and places that had become part of the rhythm of my life over the course of the past eight years. And when a relationship ends, or metastasizes into something almost unrecogniseable, you lose not only a partner, but a whole network of people and places that you had become a part of, and that had become a part of you. Family and friends, restaurants and parks, streets and homes you visited regularly are suddenly divorced from your reality. Which isn’t to say that this new reality is necessarily unpleasant; it’s merely become a shadow of its former self. A skeleton lacking meat on its bones, a corpse waiting to be fattened up. A life waiting to be rebuilt in a different way. What I had been building for all those years had already collapsed before my eyes; the shaky foundation gave way some time ago, despite our honest efforts. But as I walked through those familiar streets last night, I realised that I had lost something else in the implosion: the main thing I had been focused on for years. My “purpose”.

your slightest look will easily unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,

as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands