Yesterday came and fled, sunstroked and dreaming.
A quick visit to Seb's workplace, his coworkers thrilled to show off their knowledge of the fiberoptic cables that they run through the city, answering my questions as though starved for intellectual foreplay.
Turns out they were laying the internet connection for my entire neighbourhood (the cable company) just underneath a library three blocks away that I had no idea was even there.
From there, I wandered higher up Montmartres, taking the first set of stairs at a run, the second set at a slightly breathless trudge, until I found the vinyards, and cracked open my book and my waterbottle and roasted underneath the sole tree of la Rue des Saules until a sudden downpour steamed off my sunburn and sent me galloping home.
Groups of tourists stopped to take pictures of the strange tattooed girl leaning against the stone wall, cars rumbled past, vibrating with the cobbles. Yellow flowers screamed their brightness from amongst the vines, illuminated against a polluted white sky, staring down the majestic buildings of a forgotten Paris. Those vines remember Edith Piaf and the Chat Noir and the thousand dreams of a new world, they have never seen the concrete sprawl of tourist traps and shitstained streets that have slowly oozed into life around them, spoiling the dream and turning the pride of one of the world's once greatest cities into empty arrogance.
Last night I avoided GianCarlo and Alex and a handful of other moviegoers, two films just this week and I've had enough passive absorption, despite the fact that Alex has impeccable taste in cinema.
Instead, I reached out across ethernet cables and across oceans, sharing large words and larger ideas with Dark, touching this or that diarlander during a few brief moments in chat, learning the name and face and textual laughter of a young lady who's as new to Toronto as I will be shortly, and
breathing heavily
all that time
to the tune of meticulous words from a giant mind
who turned a new year of forever young today.
Today, I celebrate, not because it marks a full year of my living in Paree
I celebrate
because somehow in a world filled with rape and nasty crawling things
Bright shining lights who fill my heart and make worthwhile the horrors
are born, and somehow burrow their way into my life.
Happy Birthday, Mr. Pyke, I will repeat what I mumbled in my half-sleep at the first hour of your today
I am ever so grateful of your birth.
Thank you, sweet universe. :)