Night walk

This time I decided to walk randomly, where my steps would take me. I went back to the little alley, hoping to see again that illuminated veranda that had amazed me yesterday - a glass veranda, with 5 sides, in which a nice little family was spending time, by the light of candles and small lamps. Something almost unbearably happy. But this time, the house was pitch black. No magic two days in a row, or at least not the same.

Today's was going to be darker and stranger; I should have known it from the beginning, in the previous street, with this dark garden closed by a twisted fence and overgrown by vegetation, by brambles, from which a few small white roses were floating. I stopped in front of it and looked at it for a long time, without knowing exactly why it fascinated me. Further on, when I had left this little neighborhood, without a regret, to take a street at random after the Town Hall, I came back on the same thing, the same effect; a small decrepit house, at the bottom of a long street, very sloping, with a very black gate, that the vegetation partly covered; it hid the main part of the house. I always liked that, that atmosphere of decay, of old age, I don't know why.

I walked up the street, which I soon realized I had never walked down. I was obsessed with the houses, as I always am in my night walks, with their illuminated, warm windows, which make you feel even more lonely, and bring back something probably very primitive - the desire to go knock on the door to get some warmth and meet other people. To appropriate their lives, also, their universe, because a house is a universe in itself. Often, just the color of a wallpaper, a picture on the wall, the shape of a lamp, give birth to stories and fantasies. Each house is a novel.

The street opened on the city. On the whole of my field of vision, small blocks of flats, lawns, concrete paths, garages; a miniature world perfectly organized, domesticated. I walked straight ahead, passing groups of quiet teenagers, fathers, nobody was paying attention to me. The orange, illuminated apartment buildings seemed unreal.

In front of a beautiful house: I positioned myself in relation to the streetlight and the branches of the trees above me, to have the most beautiful light and the most beautiful framing. And I realized again that I don't see reality; I see my fantasies, and I don't approach the real as a real, but as an aesthetic material, a work of art that would only ask to be fixed, by pressing a button.

When I left the blocks, I was once again on familiar ground; nothing prevented me from going back down to the town hall, then returning home. But as in a dream, I saw again paths and streets that went up towards districts that I had not noticed until then. I went up a discreet street where almost all the houses were plunged in the dark. The impression of unreality grew stronger, and culminated when I arrived in front of the cemetery. Its long wall ended the street and blocked the horizon; above it, the moon, absolutely full, yellowish, enormous. The funeral home looked like a Roman building, and with its exotic plants in front, I felt more than ever like I was in a setting. On the other side of the road, there were warehouses, then trees and night.

I walked along the cemetery and down a small path under the branches, which overlooked the fields; we were leaving the city. But another branch led to abandoned military barracks, closed by barbed wire. The ground was muddy. The feeling of unreality gave way to other, more personal thoughts, old faces came back to me. A subtle change of atmosphere, from one step to the other, as always, on several occasions during the walks; each street corner, each architectural nuance, each subtle modification of the lighting took me to other interior worlds. I thought of Emilie Forest. I repeated her name to myself, like a mantra, or as if to give her a little reality, a little flesh. Her name hadn't appeared to me for years, and seemed to appear from a previous life. Emilie Forest; a waitress's apprentice who was my neighbor when I was a young student, and who was the first person I knew and dated there for a few weeks before she simply disappeared. I wondered if she was okay.

Note: as I reread the account of this walk, I thought of Beatrice, wondering why, since she never lived in that neighborhood, and before realizing that it is now at the cemetery up the hill where she lives, or to be more sadly accurate, where the ashes of her body are. I also remember now that I had given her this text to read, since we were talking about meditation, which she practiced assiduously to keep the pain as far away as possible – in addition to the multiple doses of ketamine that she took daily – generally without much success. I told her that walking around in a certain state of mind was a form of meditation; moving forward without thinking, with an empty mind, completely open to perceptions on the one hand, and to ideas and mental images arising by themselves, uncontrolled, in the mind, on the other.