Today a free soul sat next to me

(To Grégoire)

Today a free soul sat next to me. An old free bird with white plastic bags full of things. Like the heavy sandbags that keep a balloon from flying up, straight to the outer space, not so heavy to force it into landing.

Today an old bird sat next to me and told me things that I would have wanted to tell, had I been an older version of myself, sitting next to a younger me on a sunny corner of a nowhere-café. He mistook me with a French writer from the 18th century and I mistook him with "nobody". He laughed when he talked about Zola, and he got over-excited when he expressed his love for André Gide. He got angry when he remembered how Nazis confiscated Nietzsche, and he cried when he talked about crying.

Today a free naked soul crashed into the asphalt and broke his cheekbones. He was all dusty and his white feathers were full of dirt and his body was full of scars and his words were full of blood. We knew how to speak pain. So we did. Bare and simple. Like two mirrors reflecting the mirror-ness of each other into each other without projecting anything. Without wanting to project anything.

Today nobody sat next to me. And I found peace in the equilibrium between two access points. One the sadness of looking at this past in a far future, and one the happiness of being aware of this passage.