Friends.
A topic I am still desperately trying to understand, a topic I started so desperately late on, I had just barely hit 20 when I finally found people that inspired me as much as taught me as much as made me feel appreciated for something other than being a good beer-hound.
Friends, I've got so many who bear that title out here, but how many will I miss if I leave?
Two. Maybe.
How many called me this morning to bitch about this or that and make tonight suddenly something I want to avoid?
Many.
Mapie inisting that she come out with us to the kebekois bar, even though she knows this is the night I head out with her ex, Seb, because he's the one who really wants it.
She organized with Sandra to meet there, and left her new boy, the one I'd once reached out to, to batter me by ICQ the moment I woke up.
Teach me to answer technical questions.
It's just a trap.
*sigh*
Checking e-mail this morning my mailbox is full from the boys back home, men I still admire so much that my self-confidence insists that they must have forgotten me by now...
...and not only are they using words I never thought they'd associate with me, but oh how it made me cry...
Need me, they said. Beautiful, they said. Happy that I'm happy and willing to live with that, but they want me there.
Want me.
Talking with such an intimacy, so much beauty and trust and love and raging intelligence and some small part of me realizes that it's the people that are important, the visions I can keep with me, keep imagining, keep returning to when I have the means.
But like the ice cave at Montenvers, it's the people that create... And despite all this running, despite the nomadic kernel of monstres, the childhood-ingrained gitane dream, the forever fear of people, people who can hurt so much...
...Some growing kernel in me realizes that it's the people I should be living for.
People that permit caring, people that permit creativity...
And last night was filled with people, with family, and it was glorious but it remains an exprience somehow, dreamlike as it seemed.
A real seder the entire ritual followed, I took my part, in hebrew even, they've all learned to read it even if they don't understand the words.
The tzimmes I made turned out a thousand times better than I remembered, somehow more than living six thousand kilometres away, this underlined my independence from my mother.
Her recipe turned out better when I made it. This sounds oh so ego-centric but it is a huge thing in my cowed little head. The cointreau was a great idea, the way everyone dug in and it was gone, just gone, so fast, so many smiles, and suddenly it was I who'd done it, an independant I.
And independent I so far from the people I love.
Surrounded by family, brilliant and sweet, their rituals non-threatening unlike the ones I suffered through until I left, and yet...
In any case, when they began to sing this or that tune and I quickly caught on and they heard my hebrew accent so different from their french-way of pronouncing the words, and when we discussed this or that significance...
I sensed this strange loss somehow, so many beautiful rituals, eleven years in jew school learning the meaning behind them, being told about the beauty, the heavy spirituality, and yet so unable to practice it for the falseness and hypocrisy I shied from in my peers at the time.
For the first time last night I appreciated it.
But I still don't identify.
When they told the story of passover from the haggadah, I read along, read out the parts they so warmly attributed to me, listened to the morals and the lessons about humans and about strength, so many beautiful lessons that so few people even garner the notion of in their rushed lifetimes.
But when the prayers began, I guiltily feigned ignorance of their tunes, read along the words silently, and yet had this urge to rebel, that same urge to sit on my hands, remembering how my teachers scolded us that sitting on the hands you use to hold a prayerbook is an insult to their god...
I didn't. I don't even have it in me to believe enough to rebel.
I just listened to the sweet voices, six men and six women across three generations, the men singing the deep rythms and the women's voices rising high and sweet and beautiful.
It was beautiful, light and peaceful somehow, the way I always wanted prayers to be, back when I still had a chance of growing to love them.
Last night it was the same as listening to a church choir for Christmas, beautiful and ethereal, but not for me.
Beautiful, pure somehow, filled with heart and spirit...
...and yet the peace I should have felt, as a jew, from hearing them, wasn't there.
Listening to David with his baritone and his guitar, the peace is there, the gentle lifting of the heart at the sound of beauty, at the sound of a human fulfilling his destiny and creating, the peace is there, the liberation, but it was not there for me in the prayers last night.
Oh, it was beautiful, it will always be a memory, the way they listened so avidly to my explanations of this or that thing that I remembered from lessons, but there was this huge sense of loss --
-- eleven years, eleven years learning something that I can't use the way it could be used, there are lessons I've incorporated into my life, charity and generosity and community and magic, but, not their way. I can't do it their way. It's changed too much, been turned by so many staunch believers who don't listen to their own morals anymore.
I'm sorry.
I will just have to hurry to make up for it and learn so much more.
And in the meantime, I miss so many people so much, friends I've never met who've touched my heart so deeply via da innernet, friends who've touched my heart still further when we put our hands on each other's shoulders and felt each other's pain.
After the play on Tuesday night, a play about love and human needs, a play in which the main actor ressembled David so strongly...
After the play Guillaume and I broke from the pack to make our own way home and I confessed to him that when I was younger, I had a hard time holding on to friends.
I'd tire of them too swiftly, excited by this or that in them, the need would be sated, and then I would return home from them one evening, irritated somehow.
I hated that feeling. Hated how selfish it made me, how unworthy of love.
And yet Tuesday night it was that again.
I'm tired of their squabbling, their "well it's his problem", the way I always get mixed up in it.
I'm selfish. I want more. I want a connection that goes beyond just knowing each other. I've been spoiled by Spider Robinson and notions of callahanian community, and I am not satisfied with an address book filled with numbers to call if I want beerage.
I'm tired of talking about drugs and sex and nothing new, not tired of giving, but tired of being demanded of.
They've become social friends, and that hurts too.
Today my heart is crying out for people.
Today once again I've understood that the Mer of Montenvers is a glorious thing, but a glorious thing that I can carry with me, that will never change, that I will one day return to, a glorious thing but not so glorious as warm arms and living heroes.
Returning from Lyon so many years ago now, I walked into Montreal convinced that I no longer had a home, that I'd never have one.
When the kebekois here talk of returning to Montreal, something in them sounds wrong, cowardly perhaps, that they can't handle the life here and they want to return to the comfort of their habits.
I am afraid of exhibiting the same cowardice, but that fear is slowly dissipating.
I came here to find a home, and through the eyes of french people dreaming of the beauty of the Canadian wilds, I realize that I have one.
In the arms of friends.
In the arms of my love.