“and the memory was located there, beyond words, a coded message from that first afternoon.”
– Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

There was a band playing in Centre Ville.

I put on my white knee length floral dress and white tennis shoes. Did nothing with my hair. Let it fall down my back, curly and messy. No make up. Just a smile and my purple backpack stocked with a book, just in case.

I spotted the dance floor and waited patiently for the band to begin. Nestled myself on a bench. Watched friends coming together. Kisses on the cheeks. Bisou. Bisou. I was alone, but I didn’t feel alone. I felt comforted by the silence of my presence. My memories belonged to no one else here. The images I’d gathered to represent ‘me’, didn’t matter. I was at a party on the other side of the world. I could be anyone.

Peaceful is how I feel right now. As I get up in the morning to make myself a cup of coffee, I sing. Not any song in particular… just a melody. From there, I move through a morning routine that is really more of a ritual, because there is something about a ritual that is magical; each movement seeming to cast a spell over my body and over my life. And as I smooth coconut oil down my thighs and up my calves, massaging my fingers deep into the muscles until they throb, like an incantation, I whisper “release. It’s okay.”

An action which begs the questions:

What am I releasing?

I’ve been thinking about this question a lot recently, and the only answer that satisfies me is ‘memory.’ With nothing but nature around me, why else would my body proclaim its desire for this unnatural stability? – that which exceeds the muscles and bones that once thought that they were enough. And whenever I see myself without having looked in a mirror, what I am seeing must, and can only be, a memory, aided by the feeling of tension which holds my face in that familiar way – these memories, reminding me that I need more than myself to be okay.

But in the mornings, in this small country home in France, I have been breathing and holding my head my head a little higher as I walk from room to room, dignified; and I’ve been feeling the way my bare feet adjust and balance against the gravelly driveway and how, if I’m breathing, my body knows how to support and protect me no matter the quality of terrain its been tasked (challenged) to walk over. An instinctual knowledge that does not come from memory, but from being.

I’ve been so afraid of failure. Of being invisible. Of being forgotten, or worse: remembered, but by a sad shrug from a room full of shoulders seeming to say “she could have amounted to so much.” And so I’ve been quick to speak questions with a voice I disliked (the tremor, the softness, the uncertainty, the repeated phrases that sound like echoes) not because I needed the answer, but because I needed to know that, when I needed to, I did have the ability to ask… can I stop now? Because I’m tired.

“Can I stop now?”

A sigh.

“Yes.”

And a week after getting here, I did for the most part. I stopped waking up in the mornings into work. I stopped making to-do lists. I stopped resting a finger between the pages of the next and last chapter, as I worked my way towards completion (must there always be a finish line?). I stopped doing more, and looked only for ‘enough’… whatever that word might mean for me (of this I still don’t know).

And then, now asking from a voice I find myself starting to love, I posed another question: where to next? And as I waited for an answer, I realized that I was hoping that a ladder would be illuminated before me, and that I would finally be able to ‘amount’ with the ease the passionate profess after they’ve embraced ‘what they came here to do’.

I saw no ladder.

Instead, this:

Perhaps each and every one of us are on our own wonderfully specific and uniquely challenging hero’s journey, but perhaps not every journey points up towards the skies to a place that towers over the rest of us, to join they – the amounted – who hold cameras at arms length in front of their beautiful mansions and say to those still searching: “want to get here too?” Maybe some journeys go downward, dismounting us from everything we thought we knew for certain and challenging us to release into gravity and to allow ourselves to fall for awhile, and to, for even the briefest of moments, be nothing; nothing but something akin to that flash of inspiration: easily lost if not immediately written down.

And what if, to that flash of inspiration, you put down your pen and said… I’m okay with losing you. Because you are not the only idea that I will ever have. You might not even be the best one.

If you think you may have heard a hint of anger in those last two paragraphs, it was there. I don’t know if that anger was necessarily peaceful… I do know it was alive.

Back at Centre Ville, the band began to play.

I slung my bag over my shoulder and walked to the edge of the empty dance floor. A gathering of adults standing along its border, talking to one another and watching the space. Waiting, like I have been, for a ladder. And then, an older man, perhaps 80’s, held out his hand to me, and in my white floral dress (my bag left behind) we danced across that empty space with spins and mis-steps and a smile so big my cheeks hurt. And in our wake, other adults joined us. And the band gratefully played for the moving bodies; for the joyful twirls. A new memory for me. A new sound.

by Christine Bissonnette

This blog features my creative (non-fiction) explorations, my spoken word poetry, and my interviews with creatives from around the world. Learn more about me by clicking here.

Featured artwork by Eva Lewarne: Lila (Divine Play)

Eva Lewarne was born in Poland and came to Canada after completing high school. In Canada she attended U of T, then OCAD, majoring in Fine Art. Her last body of work Enigma and Illusion are influenced by her many years of meditation practice in Zen and Tibetan Buddhism.

Learn more about her paintings: www.evalewarne.com
and photography: www.evalew.com