Some days, I have enough of that little ember inside me to feel just a little bit the hippie.
This morning, the m�tro heading north to Porte de la Chappelle was closed due to an "incident on the line" (this time I really do believe them that it was just a technical accident tho since to watch them do construction work at Marx Dormoy is to cringe until the danger zone is past) and while the shuttles they'd prepared took many times as long and smelled many times more unwashed-crowded, the vision was something I'd forgotten I'd been meaning to see.
Voyez-vous that not two blocks from chez moi is la rue Ordener that slithers west all the way from Mapie's urgent neighbourhood, through the yellow-bricked bourgeoisie of the foot of Montmartres just south of chez moi and on towards the slightly uncomfortable dirty grey of the dix-neuvi�me where it is rare that I will wander alone.
Well, just west of chez moi is where the kilometer of graffitti begins, and I've been told about it so many times, about the brilliant washes of colour, about the all-too-rare-these-days passion that went into the violent mosaic of images, messages, dreams embedded into one thousand sprawling meters of slate-grey concrete wall.
It's beautiful, and when the shuttles paused a few moments too long at every corner in the unfathomable (how did we get here?) morning traffic and everyone sighed collectively at the detention, their grey suits or torn coveralls expanding in disturbing unison, I just went on starin', awed, and struck mute through the north windows.
I pointed out the murailles to the woman beside me and the smile that exploded on her face was An Important Thing.
Traipsing into work after gleeful discussion on the next shuttle with the adorable little lady that works downstairs at Alain Afflelou and her rather ambitious stagiaire (with the spiked hair) and running into Christophe, the man who plays in three copper bands (yes Steven, his band IS a trumpet section) and makes pat� in his spare time, I walked into a wall of environmentalist discussion on The Penultimate Mailing List.
(Penultimate only to its own potential)
I may or may not have gotten carried away bringing my personal hippie shit and confused idealism onto the tail-end of a motivated discussion about all sorts of things that not enough people even pause to think about from Greenpeace to just paying attention to population growth.
Granted, we've been talking since last time I picked up and fucked off for France and our list of solutions is still frightfully scarce, but...
Anything that impinges on the forgetting is a bright and colourful thing.
...nearly as bright as the glow about his face still nestled into my polochon, and the smell of him magnified by the greenhouse enclosure of cotton sheets. Just that smell is enough to stoke the embers housed in these tired cockles.
I am terrified to let him leave. Even though my vacation days are out and my daylight is confined to the false woodgrain of this desk, I know that his footsteps are echoing on a pavement that I can swiftly reach, and I know that when I have trudged enough into the evening that I will allow myself to be the first to pick up and race for the blinking red dot that is his heat pattern on this frigid city.
I am terrified.