9/20/2025
They were all there. Flickerings of light on the screen of the mind, that I thought were gone forever. I was certain they'd leave because they always had. Yet somehow, there they were. These newcomers who were tapping on the window of consciousness were so attractive and familiar, yet foreign and tragic. Tragic, because I knew they belonged to a world that would soon be gone, and them with it. So I let them in, perhaps out of sympathy and premature mourning. They, like anyone, deserve a last celebratory sojourn before ceasing to exist.
Their faces wore masks of olives, mayonnaise smeared on a torn off piece of baguette céréales and salami. One resembled the barista at the bakery down the street, another wore the sign of the pizza place whose name began with 'Five' written in yellow italics across the street from her.
Then there were the directions that I had tried so hard to repeat, from the 'francais facile' audio recording Helène gave me in our lesson that preceded the bread and the mayonnaise, tuna and deli meat. "Je cherche l'hôtel-auberge," explained the narrator, "je suis à gauche du lac". There was the first gauche, then the police station, then droîte, then your first gauche again, then droîte, and you'd arrive at l'hôtel auberge.
More details of the day trickled in. The lined pattern of a man's black short sleeved buttoned shirt that looked soft and nice as I passed by him on the metro platform. There was a woman next to him too, whose face I couldn't recall.
My mind raced backwards to see what other pieces of my recent life hadn't yet faded. It walked through the conversation that I'd had with Adèle, Lilou-ann, Nola and Sofianne the week before in my living room. They had peppered me with French slang that seemed to slip away the moment they explained it. I remembered forgetting it and the feeling of being lost. But, now some fragments reverberated. A word that I thought meant fool was translated to something that sounded like "oeuf." Another word that sounded like "freak," meant money.
They'd told me you could switch around the first and last syllables for words. A proper "femme" became a casual "mmefe". Something that was weird was not "looche", but "cheloo". As I lay there, these memories came flooding in streams of color and internal sounds that somehow vividly resembled the scenes I had once experienced. Then, they left as swiftly as they came, making their last triumphant assertions in the stillness and the darkness of my bedroom.
On my run the following morning, I considered these visitors while weaving between peugeots and strollers. Was there a pattern? Why did I recall the metro man's shirt and face so precisely, yet his companion remained hidden. Why the sight and taste of tuna and olives, and not of my tea cup beside them? Perhaps if I were younger and more clever, I thought, I could construct one and fool myself into believing it.
Why do these apparitions matter, anyways? I let the question come, go and come back again as I turned across my shoulder to check for traffic. It wasn't until later that I realized that these strangers, whom I at first pitied, are my only company. It was not out of sympathy that I'd let them in, but out of longing. Longing to be a bit less alone and a bit more at ease in the world I'd constructed around me.
It was also because I realized that without them, I would no longer exist. My sense of self is not formed by these strangers themselves, but rather by the act of welcoming them in and treating them like family. When we invite them in, we affirm our own identity. To refuse them would be to refuse ourselves.
So why, I shuttered, did they now seem strange?