The sky is on fire. Its flames extend beyond clouds and buildings and hits your face which you've instinctly turned towards the window. All this gold on your dark skin and curls, it is beautiful.
Your eyes closed, your wobbly head resting on the train's door, a quiet smile on your face tilted towards the dying sun, I sit next to you on a folding seat and I envy your peace.
We cross path often, you and I, we take the same train from Paris to the Eastern suburbs. It is usually late in the day… as the winter crawls upon us, we feel heavier and spent by the time we commute back to our respective towns. We don't always chit-chat, there are days, like today, when we let each other rest in her thoughts and from her day.
I know that you're a dentist, that you have two twin boys, I know that your days are long, from the time you get up to get them ready for school to the moment when you can rest your feet, you only have so few but precious hours of sleep. I've never heard of any man in your life, I've never asked but from your sad smile I guessed there were some disappointment and tears.
You always look prim and proper and neat. You have to, you explained once, your clients are already stressed enough as they are. "If I dress as I usually do during the weekend, they'd never let me touch their teeth!". And then you laughted with warmth and amusement and it was as if a new flower had bloomed on the train.
"This light burning the sky outside, it is so heart wrenchingly superb" you utter suddenly. "You should take a picture". You've learned by now that my twitching hands constantly snap shots of the most useless and sometimes the most amazing things. You open an eye and let out a laugh, for, of course, I have already taken a good dozen pictures with my phone. You take yours out and shoot me. Snap!
Sometime, you think you've reached the end. The end of the road, the end of your will. You don't understand how you go on but you do, because there is no other way, because you won't know of different paths than your own. Because the unthinkable does not exist in your world and values, and so there it is, there is no solution but to walk forward in the darkness.
After all, it is your own road on which you walk through life, or rather, you belong to it, you've lost yourself in its hills, somewhere along the way, bend after bend, obstacle after another, you've shed bits of yourself and can't remember being something else than what you are today. There's been happy moments, shiny memories filled with carefree joy and light, and maybe that's where your energy comes from nowadays.
Most days you feel grey and unseen and unimportant. You're the tallest girl I know, and also the thinnest, yet you feel petite and obese. You're trapped in your life, you're trapped in your body, in your unfulfilling job, in the unseen pain of the everyday details and futilities.
Every detail is so important and failed.
You feel invisible, like, no one sees you, no one really needs you even though you're indispensable and so demanded upon that you never seem to have time for yourself. You manage a team of eight in a marketing firm and you can't remember having time on your own, just you and the silence and the wind in the leafs. You'd walk down the river and lie on the grass under an old tree, and you'd watch the sky and the sun through the branches, and you'd listen and be heard.
How horrifying… To be alone with yourself once more and face the truth of what you think you've become. You've put the bar so high for yourself that you're bound to fail.
Sometime though, you forget that you hate your life and yourself and the choices you've made. You had reasons for them, they were probably sound ones but now that you look back everything seems wrong. Yes, somedays you let go of what you think you should be, your soul takes a break and puts its personal cross aside. For a while your body relaxes, your face becomes appeased and the shadow of a smile that I've sadly become used to gives light to a true laugh. You tilt your head gracefully, (unbeknownst to yourself you are a truly graceful and beautiful person…), your eyes look upon the world with happiness for a short while. It is not easy for you, to be happy, to be carefree.
I see you. From afar I close my eyes and I see your chestnut hair, your grey eyes that always reminded me of a painting of the ocean. There are storms and stories behind your eyes, unspoken tales that even I don't know.
You could never be invisible to me, I could never not need you in my life. And I could never ask anything of you other than what you would want to give me. It's like that. We met in the crib, our mothers had the same nanny, we went to the same schools, the same library and bell-ringing club, we fought over opinions and candy and sometimes dated the same boys. We helped each other with acne cream, college choices, husband decisions and anti-wrinkle cream shopping. You're my kin. I saw you grow up and make choices, I gave you my opinion and sometimes we fought and I gave up, but even I can't quite say when the corners of your mouth took a sad turn.
Strangely enough, I've seen a new spring in your step lately. Something that looks a lot like hope and will. The determination to be who you are and nothing else, as if you were in your car and turned left instead of going on the same old boring road. Your path seems rockier and harder, and yet new and exciting and scary and perhaps fulfilling.
I think it's called being yourself again.
You could never be careless but you seem carefree, or at least carefully free… I can't put my finger on it, and it doesn't matter. I think I can trust you to make your own path, I'll worry for sure, I'll wake you up in the middle of the night and ask you silly questions, and, well, maybe next Saturday we could go to the pub and get drunk like old times, and you'll tell me the story behind this new smile haunting your lips.
Bends on the road used to be romantic. They were ideas of fiction you read about in books, exciting aventures that would happen to you when you’d be older.
Today, you are older. There is an epipen in your fridge, your husband is hitting the bars after working long hours, your wife’s been cheating on you for 13 years, your mortgage is due and you can’t pay. Today, bends on the roads are harsh, they hit you plain and hard, bends in the roads are painful. There used to be joy, there will still be joy one day, and yes, sometimes great happiness waited for you behind the corner, the birth of your child, a lover’s revelation, the smile of a friend, the recovery of a close one. You know there are as many good things as there are bad things waiting for you as you turn on the road, but today, you have grown weary of life.
You have your own road, in the corner of your mind, it’s a place very real which you haven’t laid eyes on for year. It is small and steep, there are trees and small houses on each side. When people ride it down, they can enjoy watching the sea from uphill, an immense, a dark blue moving mystery.
You only rode it once. That’s all it took for a bend on this one road to hit you hard. You broke your skull, you broke your shoulder, your flesh burned on the road. Your ear was slashed and blood tinted the asphalt. You lost consciousness and thought you were gone forever. There was a friend behind you, on her own bike. She caught up with you, ready for a joke, ready to make fun of your clumsiness, look at you, falling like a child and not getting up again. She left her bike on the side of a ditch and saw your body sprawled on the road. That’s all that was left, unconscious limbs and a growing pain that would never leave you. It is still there today, walking life with you and marking the light with it’s shadow.
When she saw you, your friend thought you were dead. For days she watched you fight, clinging to an invisible rope that got you back to the light. You came back damaged, you came back bitter and feeling unwhole. You too, for many years, thought that a part of yourself was left there. That life had taken something from you it shouldn’t have. That your hopes had died, slipping away from you with your blood on that particular day. Through the pain, through the years of rebellion, of tears, of resignation, through the time it took you to grow up, your thoughts took you back to this one road that changed your life.
But you never did go back. Until now.
You took the train and walked along the beach until you reached the small town whose name was burned in your mind. You took your time, the wind hissing in your ears, twirling your hair with sand and salt and life. You sat there for a while, watching the sea, taking the light in. Then you turned your back from it and faced the hill. You walked the road slowly. Your mind empty, your senses taking everything in, the smells, the sharp colours, the sense of peace and quiet invading your soul.
Today you know that you were born that day. The person you’ve fought to become, who you are today, wouldn’t exist if not for this bend on the road. You may not be who you were set to become, there is a painful darkness laying within you, but overall you feel blessed. Your life didn’t stop. You carried on. You built yourself an imperfect life, as we all do. Your child almost died today, your husband is an alcoholic, your wife will sleep with anyone but you, your house might be taken away from you. You are pregnant after years trying, you just fell in love for the first time, you made up with your mother, your best friend survived cancer.
You don’t know what is is that is changed in you, you don’t know for sure that anything has changed. You will keep on walking your life with its light and shadows, you will keep on having successes and making mistakes. This road in the countryside looks like any other road, it is meaningless to any one but you. It shouldn’t matter as much, yet you feel there is a slight shift within you, a door opened on peace and a promise of joy. That you will walk towards it remains a choice to be made. That you are there, that you have a choice, that you are free… it is the greatest gift of all.
de l'encre au bout des doigts 