Leaving a place is one thing. Landing in a new habitat is another. And you quickly forget, once settled in for some time, how physically and emotionally demanding it is. It’s a parachute jump, and we hope from the depths of our being that it will unfold and that the landing will be as smooth as possible.
In 2016, when you arrived in Montreal, you emerged from a painful break-up that greatly compromised your mental health. It is customary to stay only a few months in one place. You jump like a frog on the water lilies of chance, on the lookout for the slightest roommate opportunity. There is often a box or two that never empties, ready to be slipped into a truck. You sleep on a mattress on the floor; it’s your raft hoping for the calm waters of a lake.
One fine day comes the moment when you meet a roommate with whom the agreement is idyllic, what luck. A year passes, and then another, and one morning you wake up with five years of memories, several songs associated with early mornings of toast and emotional complicity. The boxes are empty. The bed has become a construction on stilts.
The time comes for a move, this time to live alone. A bliss to have outstretched hands to help you. Friendships are born between two pieces of plywood furniture and sweaty smiles. Swirls in the drain the black water of the rooms where we have given love to settle. For a week, you swap the song of red-winged blackbirds for the cacophony of drills. You count your bruises every day, from this activity comes a map of the departure.
You say yes to this new place which becomes your new habitat a little more each day. It offers you its symphony: its gurgling pipes, its creaking slats, its jets of light thought differently. Little by little, the new place offers you an arc of benevolence, the aching walls straighten up to offer you a roof until the next chapter. The rooms dilate and the anguish sands away. You find remnants of life before you here. This little note in the kitchen drawer of the former tenant: “Bon appétit, I love you xxx. “. It tells you about a time when someone was happy.
You wake up with this light that lives in the new paint, your new skin. You think of these places that have inhabited you, of the imprints you left, of those they left you.
This apartment in Baie-Saint-Paul in a sad stucco semi-basement.
This apartment on boulevard Henri-Bourrassa in Quebec City learning the language together, mouth open for the slightest drop of rain, love knitting a purl stitch, a knit stitch.
And the one about Bressani in life after the breakup where you want to make sure, at the foot of your bed, that the sun will come back in the morning.
On Bourbonnière where you try your hand at love under bandages. Men to bury the past. You bring tears back to the earth in the parks and the flowers grow in the will to disappear immediately.
This apartment on Aird, where you dream so much you become real, where small tiptoe steps become big steps and then jumps and then flights.
Maya, your cat, clears her worries back and forth in the hallway. The young adults of the neighborhood push the future on wheels. For the first time, you remove the membrane of fear, this film that prevented you from tears of joy. You cry and the flowers that grow from this sometimes anxious, sometimes amazed salt no longer want to disappear.
You smile at yourself in the mirrors that you install. You say: I am not alone, I am with all my experience, all past and future selves. There is this great silence dreaded for so many years. Now you hear yourself thinking and it’s a lot less bad than you thought.