August 20, 2006
Postcard perfect day
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I can't quite explain what has possessed me this summer. The days seem to melt under the heat of the sun, and I no longer remember them one by one, singularly — or maybe that's just a sign that I've been keeping much too busy.
A quick spell of research — though it would have been faster if I'd read an old entry on my own blog — saw me out of the apartment within the hour, and I was out on the streets hunting for a place I thought I'd not find again.
It is strange, what one's mind chooses to remember and what it chooses to forget. I'd forgotten so many things, including the name of this place. I'd forgotten that I'd written it down so I should be able to find it once more — especially when I knew they were going to be moving when I was to be on the other side of the world ...
And perhaps that's what has possessed me this summer. The flashes of memories, isolated events that have continually come back to haunt me over the course of the last months have made me brave the heat, slather on the sunscreen and go for long, seemingly aimless meanders.
Some weeks ago I'd found an old building I must have photographed three summers ago, a place that stirred of possibilities precisely because it'd been left to die — dreams of converting unused spaces into bookstores, complete with a cafe. It turned out that someone still lives at the back of this place, even if the very old shop-front was terribly dilapidated and looked untouched for decades. Last Saturday, I systematically combed a quartier searching for a back street that had existed simply as a still photograph in my memory — disconnected from any true sense of location or time — with only the vague recollection that I had accidentally stumbled upon it once or twice, along the way to somewhere.
And today, I found myself in a completely foreign cafe, with nothing of what I remembered. But I was handed a menu, gifted a warm smile, and I took myself through the back door onto the very pleasant terrace, right next to the tall plants of flowering basil, mint, and herbs I couldn't identify or didn't know the names for. On the other side of the fence seemed a regular backyard, with very regular grass, very regular laundry on a very regular washing line. The girl forgot my order for a fruit smoothie, but it didn't truly matter. The sun was a little difficult to read or write by, but that didn't matter either. The gorgeous dish of food that finally arrived affirmed that some things may change, for better or for worse, but the creative mix of flavours that found its way to my mouth told me that they still have the same chef.
So perhaps, that's what has possessed me this summer: the need to hang on to things that so very nearly faded away. Frightened as I am of the fragility of this existence, the guilty knowledge that halfway across the world, there lies no peace under senseless explosions. How tenderly delicate all this is, when today I gaze at your eyes through a millennia of flying electricity, because tomorrow still waits for the sun to rise.
Posted by sniffles at 11:04 PM | Comments (0)