(one sunday in the dead of winter i found myself at the top of the peace tower. there was nowhere else to go; we had run out of escapes. at the top of the tower i wanted to swim under the ice of the ottawa river. i longed to abandon myself to the flow that followed a slope under the stillness of the ice. there was a warm invite to the movements of a river one couldn’t see; a life on the sly. i wished to kill those grey and latent times by way of long and generous impulses. la néréide des neiges, un dimanche.)
under the pale blue skies of the golden horn, i think of snow. i rarely write about snow, for every year winter puts my blood to sleep and haunts my heart with the mysterious aches of a setting sun. in the black and white of winter days and nights, skies are cut into feeble slices. everything succeeds itself in an opaque list without grounds: brittle nails, coils, distant lullabies hummed underwater, salt crystals in the hollow pools of our eyes. the only snow i ever love is the first snow, as it shushes our shivers under blankets of white.
(quiet, it’s snow. so quiet. watch it drop between us two, within our century-old walls, and our lone stairs binding. watch it drop until it stops, just like us, for a pause, and we can see our eyes. maybe you can see mine the same way i see yours, in that moment before they close in the white.)
i will be lucky if i see any snow this year. i do not miss snow, but i miss the struggle. as an expatriate i am allowing myself this febrile, open-wound nostalgia for the motherland.