Saint Valentine
Going Through Old Notebooks Part 22: "I am surprised to exist these days, surprised to exist and be perceived, walking along in my green coat. Am I too not a ghost?"
The rue de Rivoli was blue and deserted in the falling dark, the naked poplars along the Seine exposed, like arteries in the body, blush-gray and lilac in the traffic lights. New red shoots were coming out of the clenched fists of the chestnuts and the lime. There were people still out in the Jardin du Palais-Royal, moving like myths under the shadows of the old trees. The Major Arcana: the Lovers, the Fool, the High Priestess with her dog, all out for a walk at night. Greek constellations halfway through their arc of comedy or tragedy.
On Valentine’s Day in Paris, the streets were full of men carrying bouquets or single red roses wrapped in plastic. They walked along, they stood at corners, they rang the bells at doorways on the side streets and between the restaurants. The florist on the corner was mobbed. All the silver buckets outside were empty. There were just some hyacinths left, tightly closed and not too showy, and some tulips, premature—more green than red. The latecomers stared at them, wondering if they would do. The florist, an older man with a young man’s smile, keeps his shop decorated with hand-copied Modigliani paintings and always plays Leonard Cohen songs. On that day, the five-euro roses went for seven euros each.
Last night the sky was so blue over the Place des Victoires that it was almost a spring blue, clear and radiant above the buildings with the orange lights in the windows coming on. The winter, already getting thin. I preferred when it was thick and eternal, in that timeless vortex of the darkest weeks of the year. January is a good month to hide in.
I am surprised to exist these days, surprised to exist and be perceived, walking along in my green coat. Am I too not a ghost? I stand on the bridge and look out at the water and think, so this is it, this is how it all turned out. The February sky overhead, and the spring coming soon. I had to get out of the house, to get out in the air, in the world, to be a person with lipstick on.
How wonderful the air felt when I went out to buy highlighters from the Office Depot around the corner on the Boulevard de Sébastopol, twenty minutes before closing. The gorgeous air, and the lights all around. I sat in front of the bakery eating a tuna fish sandwich and thinking. The dusk gathering, the sky tinged pink. It is so much better than the closed box of the apartment, where I’ve been captive, up and writing every morning at 3 a.m.. Some prowling, fox-like, banshee of a thing stirs at that hour, in the cold quiet; a hallucination, silver-eyed and twisting as smoke. What magic rises up out of the buildings in the darkness before the day begins?
Late at night, so late that it’s early morning, revelers shout in the street below. Going home, finally, from the bar downstairs, with its green neon sign and basement dance floor. They are always there, on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sunday mornings—the young—their voices crashing and shattering against the stones, saying nothing, calling as birds do as they take to the trees. In all seasons they are there, loud as history.
This post was adapted from a notebook entry written in 2023.
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That is an absolutely gorgeous piece saturated with colour, vivid in the imagination.
This was such a wonderful treat to read, thank you!