Beautiful Cynicism III

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?