St-Vincent
Un p'tit coup de couteau
trois p'tites balles dans le dos
St-Vincent joue avec les mots
Du whisky ou d'la vodka
Peu importe, �a ira
Je veux partir encore...
Les Tetes Raides. A band I discovered in some forgotten tiny town not an hour from Lyon, where an entirely different Guillaume had taken home his best friend to meet the parents. We were wandering some suburban street when we heard this sound echoing from a garage...
His favourite band that we'd been listening to play off a ricketty tape on a rickettier tape player in his dorm room at INSA.
It sounded so live.
It was. They were practicing for the first show of their concert run in 1998.
They invited us to sit and watch, and gave us tickets to the performance at this ancient crumbling opera house, peeling worn red velvet seats packed to the rim with people of too many varying ages to make sense.
Nine musicians, and they pick up and switch instruments, at least four or five different ones from violin to electric guitar to sax to cello to accordion, they way I swap ethernet cards.
I've heard that song (and a handful of others) in so many twirling centers, the eyes of so many gales, in Guillaume's dorm room, at juggling practice the first time I breathed fire (successfully), the day I left France the first time, the week it finally hit home that I'd returned...
And today, walking into Sophie's appartment for a sudden invitation to sample her whisky.
I was very in the mood for it too, had planned to come home and tip myself over a bottle of Vodka and leave. Just leave. Just for a little bit.
This evening I decided to march to meet GianCarlo, hurtling sneaker-footed up over Montmartres and towards Pigalle. Everytime some viscuous man grabbed my elbow I swore under my breath that this would stop soon. That would be another thing ending soon.
After a handful of conversation, yet another too-long goodbye...
The neon slowed in its spastic flickering and I walked away from another set of last ever bises trapped in another storm. When Seb's phone rang with invitations for whisky there were a thousand screaming voices reverberating already.
Walking in to that song, we drank and danced and talked of travelling light in the backpack and lighter in the heart and discovering new selves in the dimensions of foreign eyes.
We talked and drank until I stumbled on flat carpeting, and then sat and talk went on and suddenly it wasn't hurting as much.
This gap, this void, that tomorrow will be filled with passing pirhanas to purchase my pots and pans and electronic things, and the day after will be filled with twenty four hours of Maja, the next two weeks will flit by on hummingbird ailerons.
Right now, though, it's very cold and very late and there are so many warm voices and I can see them so vividly, the deep round rolling shape of that one, the high peaking enthusiasm of another.
They're all there, so many warm arms waiting, and here so many of them still grasping, and yet in the cold light of my empty living room
my posessions disappearing tomorrow, and the pride that I'd taken in how I'd made this appartment a home being sold off as so many empty material ties
I will be light in the heart when they are gone, light in the backpack and thrilled to be spending a few moments living for something other than the shape of my proud kitchen
right now, though
oh right now...
On n'est pas nihiliste
c'est la rue qui dit tout �a
le prochain sur la liste
c'est toi tu me raconteras
Un p'tit coup de couteau...
Sometimes it just hurts, that's all. Sometimes I don't feel like banishing it in a feat of courage.
Sometimes I crawl into bed, cold and shivering, surrounded by love and perfectly aware of the brilliant suns on so many upcoming horizons
and yet
and yet
It is so very cold tonight.