my waking life
quietly listening to: the arcade fire "in the backseat"
i find my time here in montreal drawing to a swift close. it is hard to not allow nostalgia or melancholy set in as i walk the streets. i try to enjoy each moment as is it were a normal day, carefree & without deep thought. however, i find it next to impossible not to succumb to the "i should remember's" & "do not forget's" & "make a visual note's" that impede my every waking moment. i am reminded of the movie "waking life" (even tho i don't ever think i ever watched the entire movie ;b)...being somehow caught between dream and reality. i feel as a character in animation, floating from place to place, encountering my own punctums with such ease, forgetting completely the efforts of walking. there is a certain relaxed energy that breathes from the streets of this city. it has pervaded the pores of my skin and filled me with a living vitality; something which i have not felt for quite some time. it is nice to feel, perhaps for the first time ever, a sincere comfort in my own skin. at almost 28, it is about time i suppose. montreal embraces this comfort & provides a space for such fitting to occur.
the possibilities appear endless here. with cent discussions of impending futures and broad horizons that lay ahead, i could not imagine a better place to mold my thoughts and allow them to be subject to their own inherent generative powers. i most certainly am not where i once imagined myself to be even say just 8 years ago. and in that number 8, it really is only in the last 1 that i was able to rise out of a muck of stagnation. i find myself more creative, more thoughful, less suppressed, less concerned with implications of certain decisions that i once would have allowed to weigh me down. i find myself writing postcards again, sending them off with a smile and confidence. for seven years (wow! astonished at how long of time has passed already) i never wrote a card with enthusiasm in my heart. maybe montreal also has magical capacities. perhas it sounds naive and silly to believe in magic, but i do. there are certain encounters, conversations, works of art, moments on the street that sprinkle magic glitter dust on me and transform me into a being i was not before. i've been overly blessed with such magic this past year.
today i walked up boulevard saint laurent, destination laika of course (where i sit and write this now). the winter chill hit my cheeks, normally an unwelcomed thing for me, but today i did not mind, the more of montreal's magic that my pores can take in, the better.
a week ago i wandered the streets with my visiting boy. through 4 inches of snowy slush slush slush we walked the city of montreal. i wonder if some of the city magic pervaded his green overcoat, if in the mustard yellow eames chairs he could feel the comfort that montreal gives my heart.
(pause...more thoughts of unknowns come to the forefront of my mind)
at some point, some sort of action will need to be put into play from which a direction of unfolding can begin...but for now, there is still a little bit of time left to ponder.