Northern Ivy

At first I wasn't afraid, but how could I be, I didn't even know what I was dealing with.
About a month ago I got off the bus and I saw this big cat in the bushes just across the road, near the woods. I live near a village ninety minutes away from the city, stray cats are not uncommon here. I was surprised at how big it was, but the minute I began to walk to my home I thought about something else. That is, until I opened my front door and saw that it had followed me in silence. It really was beautiful, with long pointy ears and a thick yellow fur. I didn't let it in though, didn't want an animal to destroy my armchair or wake me up at night running through the corridors.
The next day at work I talked to a few colleagues about this, and someone asked me if I was really sure it was a normal cat; I didn't really know, so I described it in details, and that same someone suggested it might be a lynx and I be careful about how close I let it get to me. I laughed at first, but when I looked it up on the web I saw he wasn't wrong: it was a lynx all right, a genuine savage beast that usually hunted rabbits and other small prey, but, if it really wanted to, could nonetheless kill you in a few seconds.
It was waiting for me when I got off the bus that same day, and I knew it was following me home, even though I didn't look behind me, because you know, that thing about not showing your fear, blahblah. I did not think it had aggressive intentions, or at least I did not feel hunted. But you never know.
It's been a few days now, every night, I get off the bus, it waits there, follows me home, I close my door and do not hear from it until the next day. I think the strangest thing is that I don't know what it wants from me; I think I would be sad, in a way, if I found it didn't wait for me some day. But when I see it there, in the bushes, strangely I wish it could talk to me ...

He felt the city was an abyss where everything about him could be lost forever. On its streets, he had no name; in the places where he had passed every day for many years, whether it was on his way to work, to the movies, or to buy a new pair of shoes, he could still walk among hundreds of faces he didn't know. Anonymity in familiar places, a stranger in his own home.
But where was home now?

The waves were huge, breaking loudly on the sides of the boat and making it rock heavily. This was no storm, but the seagulls seemed to be having some dangerous fun playing in the strong wind, against the clear skies. He saw his home far away, getting more and more transparent in the distance. He felt nausea clenching his chest, and didn't know if it was seasickness or something else.

He had no idea what the sea was trying to tell him.

I didn't have any pictures of her, and I needed one because otherwise I forgot what her face looked like. I had this kind of mnemonic quirk, a malfunction of some sort: in the first days of a relationship, the face of the girl I love is right behind my eyes, as if it was burned into my brain; but after a short period, I begin to have trouble remembering her traits, like a quickly fading picture. It's a bugger because this happens right at the moment when love is at its most exhilarating, when you spend most of your time daydreaming about your loved one and trying to remember her image. Funny enough, it's only the face that I have trouble remembering, the rest of the body stays in my memory with each of its smallest details...
I asked her to come with me for a stroll so we could enjoy the last days of the summer together. I told her I would bring my camera and that she was what I wanted to take pictures of; she was horrified - she didn't like to be photographed, and thought she looked dumb and ugly. So, joking, I asked her to try to be as ugly as possible. She made a few faces at first, until she began to feel comfortable about the camera looking at her. I took about four rolls, mainly close-ups, squinting at the sun, looking away distractedly, laughing or backlit by the sunset. She wasn't the kind of girl that people notice; I knew that most men wouldn't turn their head if they crossed her on the sidewalk, but the more I looked at her, the more I thought she was magnificent, and considered myself lucky to have found such a discrete treasure. I couldn't wait to see what would come out of the darkroom.
I walked her back to her place and we kissed, she went up the stairs and turned back, waving and smiling at me as she opened the door. Very lucky, indeed.
When I got back to my own place, I noticed my camera was missing; I had it on my shoulder, someone must have stole it in the crowded bus...

They had said three days before on TV that there might be a snowstorm, that friday. It was in the middle of february, so nobody was surprised; in fact, most people were rather pleased at the news since it hadn't snowed for two weeks, and what fun is there to have in winter when it's only cold? Ski buffs were already changing their plans for the weekend, children were taking out their sleds and crossing their fingers, hoping the storm would be big enough so that school would be off on Monday... What they didn't see coming was the large mass of warm air going north along the eastern United States. Well, actually they saw it coming, but they thought it would be gone when the storm arrived. It wasn't. This meant that all the snow that was supposed to fall on Montreal on that Friday was, in fact, rain. So the snow storm expected by everyone was replaced by a massive ice storm.
The first day it felt sort of magical, when you put aside the fact that you had to walk very slowly to avoid falling at every step. When the night fell around five o'clock, rain had been pouring down for a few hours, and there was about five millimeters of ice covering everything; and it wasn't stopping. Taking the bus, or anything with wheels for that matter, was plain crazy, you had to walk if you wanted to go somewhere. So I was walking to François' apartment, where we were having dinner with a few friends. I remember taking a shortcut through the Park Lafontaine, where all the branches in the trees were hanging down under the weight of the ice, which made them look like different varieties of willow trees; but more than that, it was how they sounded that was the most beautiful. The soft wind blowing though the ice-covered branches made them sing, clicking like a thousand carillions in the exceptionally silent city night. I had to stop and listen, knowing that I would not often have the chance to hear that sound again.
When I got to my friend's place, electrical power was down; it had been for the last hour. The ice on the power lines made them heavy, and some snapped, even in the slight wind. It seemed a large line feeding most of the city was breaking up a few kilometers away, so many people had no power, and no one really knew when it would be back - we all knew this because François had a small radio that worked on batteries, and every station was talking about only one thing: the storm. Since nobody knew if there was power at home, and François had a fireplace in his living room, everyone decided to stay the night until power went back on. Ah, we were so confident!
Saturday afternoon, the rain stopped, but the ice stayed, and nobody had their power back at home. It was also beginning to get cold outside, around minus 10, like a normal mid-february day... We all went for a walk together, if you can call that a walk: there was a good 2cm of ice everywhere, including on the sidewalks, so we were more skating with boots than walking, tightly grouped so that if one seemed to fall the other six could catch him or her in half a second. We didn't plan it, it was just the optimal way of walking for a group of friends on the ice. Also it was quite funny.
We saw a lot of branches on the streets that had broken up under the weight of the ice; cars of wich you couldn't guess the making, encased as they were in their thick shielding; and a few broken power lines hanging from their post, dancing and buzzing and throwing short blue arcs of electricity on the pavement. That night, we ate pasta boiled in the fireplace, all sitting close together since it was getting rather cold in the apartment. Salvador, a friend of François from Cameroon who had come to Canada for the first time just a week before, was really beginning to be afraid. The man, always friendly, always laughing and making jokes, told us he feared for his life. At first we laughed, but then we saw he was genuinely frightened. He never really felt cold in all his life, whereas we lived with it six months a year... okay, maybe not inside our living room, but you know. We did our best to reassure him, and let him sleep right beside the fireplace that night.
The rain came again on Sunday, but this time it seemed the air was warm enough so it wouldn't freeze on the spot. It made everything melt in a few hours. City employees would have a lot of work in the next days, repairing the broken lines and taking out the branches, and it wouldn't be simple, since the weather announced in the night between Sunday and Saturday was a snow storm, a real one this time. Power was coming back gradually in the city, block by block, but since it was a little erratic we decided to spend one last night at François'.
Later, maybe around two in the morning, we still couldn't sleep so we went for a walk. The biggest part of the snow storm had passed, now there was only large snowflakes gently falling down in the cold and silent night, and we were walking up our ankles in snow. I think it was Julie who threw the first snowball, but it quickly degenerated in an all-out take-no-prisoners everyone-against-everyone snowball throwing fest. Everyone was laughing and yelling their asses off, and Salvador participated like he had done this since his early childhood.
The next morning the snow was over, the sky cloudless and the air cold and crisp; like everyone else, I went home to see if everything was back to normal. We parted without ceremony, but we felt like we had spent a weekend on vacation away from home, which we did, in a way. In the streets, the children were making snowmen and castles, all to happy that most of the schools were closed.

It's the sound of the wind that woke me up, even though I had been feeling cold and damp for, I think, one hour - I don't really know, I was half asleep. But the smell of the soil and the dry leaves on my cheek was what really pulled me out of my slumber, fast, like someone pulling me by the collar. This was not where I expected to be.

I was in the woods, somewhere, I didn't remember anything. I mean, well, I remembered who I was, where I lived, what I did for a living and so on, but the reason why I ended up asleep on a bed of dry leaves was a mystery. It was the same feeling as when you try to remember what you had for dinner two nights before: even though you know where you were, and you know that you had dinner, it always takes one or two seconds before an image comes to mind. For me, now, trying to remember when I was last, it was like these two seconds could go on for hours. "Fuck!", I said, angry with myself, and then I looked around again, trying to see some sort of path or house or wathever could lead me back to my home. I saw nothing but trees. I yelled a few more "fucks" at the top of my lungs, I felt rage and frustration crawling up from my stomach.

You see that wasn't the first time this sort of thing happened to me. I think the worst was when I woke up somewhere in a hotel on a beach in Morocco without the slightest idea of what had brought me there. And who was the girl besides me. And why I had handcuffs tying me to the bedpost, and a shaved head, and the Union Jack tied around my waist. I had to wake her up to ask her where she put the key, then I quickly got dressed and told her that I was going to fetch breakfast. She sort of smiled, a little puzzled, and I left the room, took a cab to the airport and bought a last minute ticket to Tokyo, where I knew I was supposed to do a demo, twelve hours later, of the new software my company wanted to sell to a big client in Japan.

Another time, I sort of woke up on the starting grid of a big motocross race on a beach in France, Osgord I think it was called. Me, who only drove automatic cars, who didn't even feel safe on a three-speed bicycle. It's a miracle I was able to drive for two hundred meters when the light went green, and an even greater miracle I didn't get splatterd by the other few hundred racers that flew past me when I fell down.

At first I thought I was mad, I thought I had something like bipolar disorder or split personality syndrome, so I went to see a psychiatrist. But nothing was found, nothing unusual in the brainwaves or neurotransmitters or whatever. Still, they gave me lithium, I took it for a while but it made me feel like a sponge in the bottom of a stale sink, so I stopped - anyway, it didn't help, I had an episode while taking it.

I zipped my coat, and figured I had nothing to gain from immobility, so I went south - it was around noon and I followed the Sun. It could have been north: I didn't even know if I was in the northern hemisphere. Anyway, it made no difference, I figured I just had to go on, as long as I took care not to walk in circles.

Finally, I got to a small house at the end of what seemed to be a long road, winding into the woods before me. There was a car. I was not lost anymore. I still couldn't tell what part of the world I was in by looking at the house, though: it didn't look like anything special, just a battered old wooden house, with a car about thirty years old in front of it, a car of which I didn't recognise the model. So I knocked on the door. I heard a voice that seemed to answer 'Eeeh', I didn't understand, it seemed to come from the basement or a distant room. It wasn't menacing or anything, so I entered.

There was an old sofa, a small table, and a rather dusty old carpet on the floor. A tall cupboard was standing in the corner, right besides an opening to what seemed to be the kitchen. The cupbard's middle door was a mirror, and it was slightly ajar; in it I could see the reflection of a man coming down a staircase, in the kitchen, to meet me. I came to him, and right before I could see his face I turned, distractedly, to close the cupboard's door. When I did, I saw for a split-second my reflection in the mirror. It wasn't me.

I woke up in a bus, I think it was the driver who put the brakes a little too hard. I looked around; the people did not seem to notice me. I didn't recognise the city I was in, and hadn't the slightest idea how I got here...

In my hometown at the end of october, the night comes early. If by any chance you go for a walk around nine, when everything seems to be going to sleep, when the wind that made the dry leaves swirl under the faint afternoon sun has stopped blowing, you will hear an unusual silence, as if the air, cold now, was so convincing in its evocation of the coming winter that everything and everybody had found a warm place to curl up.
If you walk alone, your thoughts will inevitably lead you to some sort of nostalgia, which might come from the foregone summer, the darkness and silence of the night, or the souvenir of a lost love. Nobody knows why, but autumn nights are a magnifying glass for beautiful sad memories.
If you turn your eyes to the sky you will notice that the stars shine more intensely than usual; if you are lucky like me, you might turn your head to a special star, a faraway star that shines a silvery glow and brings you comfort and joy, a star which is there all year long but never as beautiful as in these october nights. You will smile to it, and you'll know, even though you won't see it, that your autumn star will smile back.