Carte blanche to Rosalie Bonenfant | How I wanted to become a green plant

With their unique pen and their own sensitivity, artists present to us, in turn, their vision of the world around us. This week, we are giving carte blanche to Rosalie Bonenfant.

Through the window, the leaves turn red, like a reminder of the passage of time, of life which is constantly moving.

Recently, it’s been exactly seven years since I died. For the sake of accuracy, I should rather say that this year, it’s been seven years since a burnt-out nurse did her best to wait until she left my room in the emergency room before sighing. You have to understand her, at that time, she was busy treating a livid and disembodied young girl. In his place, I would probably have thought: “Really? Haven’t you seen how overwhelmed I am with the dozens of other accident victims? And you, are you telling me that you ended up here of your own free will? Not quite, ma’am. Exactly. That wasn’t exactly the plan: to find myself bare-assed in a hospital gown, distressed to confess to my mother that I had not only failed at happiness, but that when I had tried to steal her forever his greatest pride, that too, I had missed.

Seven years since “the event whose name must not be pronounced”, it is not really the kind of anniversary that we celebrate with streamers and trumpets. Nevertheless, I wanted to capitalize on my freshly acquired euphoria of living to admit with humility that I finally overcame my fear of being happy. Because it seems to me that wanting to exist is just the kind of thing worth celebrating.

It took me a while to understand the craze around life on Earth. I mean… Calm down, everyone! It may be extraordinary, the wind, the hills and the tides, ABBA and the iced cappuccinos, we still don’t know what it’s for, all that. Who set up this huge animated model on which we are stuck? And why is it so inappropriate to frankly name our discomfort at the idea of ​​being prisoners of a super big rock floating in the cosmos? Does anyone find it strange that we pretend nothing on a daily basis, while the absurdity of the whole world hangs on our shoulders like a ball of unanswered questions?

I guess it’s okay to speculate a little, when the time is right. (Around a joint by the fire, for example!) Where it becomes more problematic is when your ball of questions ends up growing so big that you can’t even understand yourself anymore. get out of your bed. (Not even if you are offered an awesome activity; a joint by the fire, for example!)

“Go take some vitamin D outside!” You gotta move! Yoga would do you good! Hum… How can I tell you that, Chantale? At the time, I was at a stage in my life where swallowing my own drool while staring into space was such a grueling project that I practically had to schedule it ahead of time. The last thing that tempts me, at this point, is to lock myself in a room full of strangers dripping with toxins freshly converted into serotonin to squirm in the shape of a dog upside down!

I agree, there is a more exciting project than that of searching its inner recesses to hope to find there a desire to participate in the collective dream. However, I dare to imagine that there is a certain universal denominator in this quest.

Nobody can pretend that the quest for meaning with a big Q is just a nice little riddle to solve! I can’t necessarily be the only one to have felt it more like an escape game that you can only escape when the board displays Game Over.

Still, over the years, by dint of getting bogged down in this nauseating molasses, I made the mistake of attaching myself to my inclination towards darkness. So much so that I ended up being more terrified of trying to be happy than of the prospect of wallowing in that painful comfort forever.

The truth is that I no longer knew who I was vertically. I only knew the greasy-haired girl whose image my computer screen reflected back to me when I finished for the sixth time in the month one sitcom that I didn’t even like.

Fortunately, everything comes at the right time for those who can get tired of wasting their days watching the hours expand. I couldn’t say exactly what happened for me to finally understand that being sad was not a personality. But I remember one morning. As I watered my newly repotted plants (the beauty of my depression was that it only darkened my thoughts, my thumbs remaining as green as they had always been), I was amazed by their liveliness. It’s crazy how much they wanted to participate! Looking at them, full of life, stretching elegantly towards the sun, I thought that they too had no idea what they were doing there, on my balcony, in the Universe, somewhere leaves in the middle of the chaos. But they had their roots in the ground. So they were pushing. Absorbed. Were transforming. They were there because they were there, and it was perfect like that.

Then at that precise moment, for one of the first times in my life, with my latte in one hand and the first notes of Super Trouper that came to me from the kitchen, I thought maybe it was just that, the excitement around life on Earth. And it was perfect like that.

Since that morning, autumn has set in.

Through the window, the leaves are falling.

Me, I cling.

I even started taking fertilizer.

A sort of hidden boost.

I hold on.

I haven’t finished pushing.