Carte blanche to Catherine Ethier | A little lasagna

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

The sun makes steps smaller and smaller and the tricks are out of the boxes. Autumn. My beauty. My fear. With autumn obviously comes gradual farewells, little deaths, delicate and prodigiously pretty, like those corpses of echinacea broken in half in the park and that little dry tree which has decided not to leaf in May and which stretches out its long fingers. of Angelica Huston on the walls of my living room, in the evening.

Despite its disastrous follows, fall has also become this great season to market. To be celebrated at all costs. To put in the coffee. This strange injunction to change hair color, a “winter color”. Make willy in Salem. The bouquet of pampas in the living room, confiding victoriously to colleagues: “I found some on the side of the highway, free! ” All that.

But during this great twilight-cabaret that makes the boxes of HomeSense trumpet November is also getting ready, this nasty month when it is more difficult to put on make-up, the trouble with a lot of sunbathing. Where the mirror suddenly returns to us the reflection of what we tried to flee. Skillfully. My speciality. Hoping for summer, missing it a bit, and receiving the sequel like a shovel to the head, hoping to cheat the dusk with a little vitamin D and a three hundred dollar lamp. Routine.

Obviously, everyone experiences their vertigo. Its jolts, according to the cabbages where we have grown. Life, what. Then we wake up, one fine morning, and we’ve been through it. With the family. The friends. A book. A curly animal. Piaf. This past year, however, has felt seismic around me. We are obviously all, at various levels, post-pandemic, the hair and the heart a little on the camp, the filed nerves and the eyes still bewildered by this whole affair, the marrow of which has not yet been analyzed. The drama of one was the peccadillo of the other. Sometimes laugh. Sometimes cordillera.

And people left. Many people. Never, from the height of my 40 brooms, have I witnessed so many tragic and unexpected departures of all kinds of acquaintances. A small extinction.

“He lit up the room. A real ray of sunshine. Nobody expected that. »

The classic finding. You never really expect a friend, sibling, co-worker, or vague Facebook friend to be out of the next Christmas, by choice. We say it will pass. We are united. From afar. Our speciality. Because it’s none of our business. Because everyone does what they can. Because we always end up recovering from it.

It’s a subject that really interests me, you will whisper to me. You say true. For some time, it happens to me more and more often, when a person ends his life and the shock wave shakes my bearings, to see a loved one line his social networks with something like: ” Please ; whether we know each other well or very little, promise me one thing, you who once crossed my path. If you have dark thoughts, call me. Write me. My door is always open. »

It moves me (I’m not an animal).

And I am intimately convinced of the honesty of these impulses, both altruistic and necessary. From this desire to help in order to survive the shock, this loss of control over what shouldn’t have happened. Backtrack.

But each time, I wonder how many people, on a night of despair, will write to this benevolent acquaintance at the wide-open door. Recognizing that you need help already requires excessive energy.

Excessive.

Identify the urge to turn off the lights, find the courage to stop hiding an unspeakable evil behind words that are less harmful to those around you, such as “dark thoughts” or even “very bad luck” to allow your mouth to utter the word suicide , it is deeply appalling. Fifteen heartbreaks deep in the throat.

Identifying yourself as a beacon and as a haven where you can come ashore is the best gesture there is. However, I take the liberty of monopolizing this space to invite you, you who are reading me and whom I am suddenly familiar with, to prepare a little lasagna.

You weren’t expecting that ending. Don’t let me go.

I invite you to prepare a little lasagna, a crisp, a macaroni, a cheesy or a box of Twinkies, which makes you happy and doesn’t amputate the falle, to bring it to someone, because there is certainly one not far, which seems to tear a little from that time.

Just a little lasagna.

This person with the blue heart knows perfectly well that you are there. Ten times she may have thought of writing to you. Ten messages you’ll never read because the last thing this person wants to do, even if they feverishly advise everyone else the opposite, is embarrass you with their pain.

That’s how it works, the big bad. It’s really cursed. The heavier it weighs, the more difficult it is to place it on the kitchen table and to look at it, together. At three. Even alone.

In this autumn with trademark spices, it is this sweet appeal to vigilant pupils that I am launching, with my voice of an old hiker of paths where trees do not always grow back. You’d be surprised how many bubbly, outwardly blooming souls go through perhaps the most painful times. This strange era prescribes in spite of itself the wearing of a mask (not the one that slows down the spread of viruses – well this one, you would be very smart to wear it –, I am rather talking about the one in the colors of “I am very well. Everything it’s great, sweater weather “).

If you have a doubt, even a shadow of a jolt of doubt (this is a very small doubt), well, you are right. Send this text. Pay attention to grain. Follow up, patiently, without judging, even without an answer. Take news. You will see, the bulb will eventually flower.

In the meantime, go and leave the oven.