There's a dream caught in my head and I can hear it muttering silkily amongst flutters of today's remembered conversation about music and being right-brained or left-brained and wondering what it meant when you were front-brained...
There is smoke rising from one of the chimneys in the slender spread of rooftops streaking from my window, and the trees are whispering ghosts for me at this hour.
I can hear it singing, some faraway memory of a place I've not yet seen, high and sweet and questioning, wondering if I will ever have the time and strength to plant a kiss on another foreign tree, or forehead, or to meet the eyes of a stranger in a stranger land and share that universal smile that defies culture and misunderstanding and the gaping differences between what we've been bred to feel is right and wrong.
It's funny, how I remember thinking how utterly un-Canadian I am, how far from liberal in my political views, I remember every moment I felt out of place here because of my old-fashioned way of touching things.
My first month in France I realized just how naive it had been to think that my polish blood meant that I was Oh So European.
But I learned a lot there, and in Switzerland, and Amsterdam and Luxembourg, the stench of North London and sharing a spiked collar with a 6-foot-long stuffed and dirt-laden whale in the squats that we shared for a week with punks we'd met when we hopped off the train.
I can't remember the whale's name, but I still have the photograph of my greasy pink-and-white-and-black hair, and the vivid memory of watching Guillaume toss clubs seamlessly back and forth with a juggler we'd met in Camden.
The juggler looked so much like my frien dThom who'll be coming up to ski with us in the morning, and suddenly I'm snapped back to my chair and my late-night glass of water and the wistful loneliness of knowing that everyone I love is safe and asleep and far away.
Sometimes I love the taste of running my tongue along the back of shining memories, feeling the smooth flavour in their texture, and for once, just for one tired, serene moment, not wishing that I could be back there, not wishing that I were still racing around the world trying so desperately to form this Great Corollary about it,
...just -- remembering the salty kisses as we bid each other adieu before I boarded the plane one last time, for what is beginning to seem an eternity.