I live in a city built upon seven million dead people.
The thought accompannying this one as we hiked the first part through the tunnels of the carri�res was that all cities are built upon the blood of the dead.
Montr�al especially, and memories came flooding of a child's horror at learning the fate of the Iroquois in elementary school history class. (this was perhaps the beginning of the bristling)
Horror at how could people just quietly continue their grey lives in their greyer cities, knowing the suffering that had gone into building the cement supports for their ultra-civilised shithouses...
Later, in the midst of teenage fury, I discovered and vociferously admonished grownups at large (it is very difficult to stick to one tangent with fingers disturbing the seam of your bra, and malicious giggling spurring more malicious giggling at the thought that malice is supposed to be fun and that Machiavelli had that maniacal laugh not just for effect oh dear...) for their staggering ability to blind themselves. (O! Breakfast Club when Ally Sheedy said it so well...: "When you grow old, your heart dies" I return to this phrase so often each lonely day one would think I would be in less danger than I really am of becoming it)
Crippling themselves I called it in my booming angry-girl voice.
Walking the rows of femurs, reminding myself every few meters that these were real bones, thousands of legs from real men who led real lives just as self-important as my own and perhaps even more important (as we passed the catacombs reserved for those that died in the revolution, there will always be a soft spot in my heart for revolutionists) the reality was still a slippery thing and the yellow glint of the curvatures of skulls shone with the falseness of resin.
Reaching out to touch one, I had to force the shocked whisper that one of my too-uptight parisian friends might have exploded in my ear at how unhygenic that was...
The unreality, surreality, sheer inability to connect empathically with the thousands of femurs so perfectly stacked and symmetrically aligned along the corridors was a totem to my own ability to grow old and numb the acuity of my own awareness.
All these serious self-accusations and all I had wanted to say was...
...that sometimes now when I will be rushing past monuments on the m�tro, or marching down one cobbled street and rollerblading up another paved avenue of this city, my city, Paris, I will remember the serpentine passageways mimicking my own paths, and upon catching a streetsign from the corner of my eye I will wonder if it is reflected five stories down, carved by a catacombs-filler's chisel marking the turns of the tunnels.
I will walk as I always have, and on occasion I will have the presence of mind of my youth to wonder if one of the many parisian forbidden catacomb-spelunkers is currently winding the same path below my feet with a flashlight reflecting from bones the way the cloud-smothered sunlight reflects from the rounded edges of the cobbles.