I recently went with F. to the medieval festival held every year a few kilometers from her home. We drove (I was driving) through several villages on the way, where I hadn't set foot since the day I emptied out L.'s grandmother's house and had no memory of.
The weather was unbelievably beautiful and F. herself remarked that it smelled like a vacation; the blue sky, the lush vegetation, the very fact of driving... I'd never driven in these communes bordering the big city, and it put me in a rather strange mental state; it was like finding myself "for real" in these dreams where I'm walking or driving alone in the city, but in a foreign, parallel, unknown version.
It was also like returning to certain memories, or revisiting an old, forgotten photo from my youth, but widening its frame to the surrounding landscapes, and having a chance to enter and explore them. A journey through time, space and memory.
These villages are part of the strange zones that abound around the city, or more precisely, non-zones, non-places, incoherent, dream-like juxtapositions of ancestral farms bordered by an ACTION store or a pizzeria, where in a few dozen meters you pass from allotments to high-rise apartments, Phoenix houses, warehouses and wasteland. We're not in the city, or the country, or a commercial or industrial zone. It's precisely nowhere.
