The shade of the trees scrolls on either side. The moon illuminates the night with a pale and sickly light. There is wind, perhaps, because the dead leaves are flying, swirling before falling back abruptly on the bitumen. Everything is suffused in a kind of wadding, asphyxiating.
I can’t hear anything. Barely the tears that slip on my cheeks. Hardly the corners, hardly the screeching of tires that try so hard to hang on the road.
In the blur of my pupils, blue flashes start flashing. I’m smiling. I hear the sirens singing. That means I’m not far from the terminus.
My head starts to turn… My body too… The lights are mixing… The images scroll… Upside down, to the place.
*
Sometimes we have this strange sensation that things have been what they should be, even if we refuse them as they are. It happens many years after they have passed. It is not really that the look on them has changed, nor is it because they take a different meaning from the fact that their time is gone. It’s just, finally, we accept them. We stop fighting against oneself, we cease because we get tired of being angry at everything, anything and above all, against what makes us simply human beings, sensitive and contradictory. I don’t know why. Maybe we’re being taught that without our knowledge. I do not know why we always run after this absolute, the idea that one should be happy in a fantasy universe of events that become in a perfect way. I do not know where the desire is to want to tell them when we know very well that they will not be understood or, at least, heard only partially.
*
I had nothing in my pocket when I arrived in the capital. I left like this without thinking. No idea what I was going to do tomorrow. I packed my suitcase. I had given my landlord my leave for a substantial compensation. I thanked my boss for being kind enough to give me the alms that barely amounted to a minimum wage for my forty-five-hour work weeks. I had taken my train ticket to Paris and I was gone. Where was I going to sleep? Would the people who knew me, worry? None of these questions arose in my mind.
Once arrived, the first thing I did was to go and sit on the steps of the forecourt of Gare Montparnasse. I was a little lost, a little sounded to have traveled sitting on my bag between two cars. There are people, lots of people everywhere, going on one side, another, screaming kids, girlfriends phoning their boyfriends because they weren’t there. It swarmed without there being, even hope, that at some point, this swarm is diminishing.
And here I met her the first time. I had not seen her sit by my side and it was only when she asked me to fire that I looked at her. First I jumped and looked up. I had never seen such a creature before. She was not pretty in the first sense of the word. It was surely too small to be totally thin, a chest invisible enough not to enter the cannons of male attraction, hair not quite blond, a little red, poorly smoothed, tangled falling heavily on shoulders All fine. His clothes were worn, poorly assorted, a slightly brown blouse too cleavage, a jean patched from all sides with pieces of various fabrics that smelt of recovery.
« What are you doing here? » she asked me after thanking me for a nod for the lighter I had strained her. « You look a little lost, don’t you? »
I couldn’t help but have this silly smile that often betrays me when I feel discovered.
« Yes, actually, I don’t really know what I’m doing here. I just got here. I’m a little lost, yes… That’s a bit of that…”
« It’s your luggage? » She asked me by planting her look on my purse.
“Yes. Two or three things that I saved by the way… That’s all. “
She started to laugh. She shot a long puff on her cigarette and continued to puffer. I did not know well what made her smile like that, but it was straightforward and I did not discern any nasty irony.
« You’re funny… » She says.
I didn’t understand.
« Don’t make that face… It’s just that you don’t know where you are and you don’t know where you’re going. You are not the first and you will not be the last to land here like this…”
She hijacked her eyes for a moment and searched in one of her pockets. She pulled a piece of paper out of it.
« Do you have a pen? »
I searched my jacket and pulled a pencil. She took it and scribbled something.
« Here, take this… « She gave me the paper with the pen.
I caught the two things looking a little incredulous.
« You’ll only have to use it if you need it… »
I unfolded the paper that she had folded in four. It was a phone number. I looked up and went around the forecourt of the gaze: the girl was gone. As if she had evaporated.