I came back to Montreal in the heavy and heavy summer, caught up in this city that I know well and yet which is already revealing itself to me in new guises even though I only left it a year ago; new businesses on certain street corners, friends who had babies I hadn’t yet met, life proliferating without my directly witnessing it.
I went to a 5 à 7 in the Old Port and its winding little streets, I tried to look everywhere, the buildings, the people, the shops, attentive out of habit to what catches my eye; certain baroque accumulations of waste or things dropped on the ground. That’s when I noticed it: a little bird, on the sidewalk of rue Sainte-Hélène, a limping sparrow. He looked at me—in my eyes, it seemed to me—, hopped a little awkwardly in front of my friend and I who were walking, and I had the impression that he was talking to us. He slipped under a parked car, I noticed his slightly crooked little wing, we thought he didn’t look very well, my heart felt a little tight in my chest, because I like animals a lot, but we were in a hurry and we went to the event that was waiting for us.
A few hours later, coming out of the launch, I was with other friends, we walked a few steps, and I saw that the bird was still there, more or less in the same place. So it was true; he couldn’t actually fly. He squealed again. He was in pain, I was becoming more and more certain. A friend said “you have to catch it”; someone else wanted to be reassured, “He’s okay, he’s got no problem.” The bird came down the street, a car was coming and heading straight for it, someone waved at the driver, I turned my face against a wall, I was afraid that he would crush. It was not the case, the bird changed direction, came back towards us, managing to hover, not very high. Maybe he had already had an accident, that was why he was like this? Or was it a sub-adult fledgling, fallen from the nest?
He headed for an alley. We figured it would be safer there than on the busy thoroughfare. I wanted to capture him, but I didn’t. We said goodbye to him. A friend of mine said we had to accept that he was going to die. We ate a vegan burger, talked about something else, the atmosphere was festive. I don’t have a very good memory, inside me images come and go, but sometimes the record scratches and I start rehashing events, microevents. I think of this bird, I try to understand the message, to decipher what its vulnerability is a metaphor for, to analyze its fragility that we have noticed without being able to take care of it, to protect it, in this time of climate crisis. , social collapse, residential precariousness; to our ability to see the difficulty of a situation, but to turn our heads, to accept the fatality of the weaker than ourselves, because we wanted to eat more quickly at the restaurant.