I am finally getting back to my Untitled Fiction Serial. From this point, I will try to post 1-2 installments a week. In order to make it easier to recognize, it now has its own logo, designed by artist KM Scott. Look for the croissant! Part III follows below.
I probably shouldn't tell you that I am naked as I write this. If I limited that confession to just one line, they would likely edit it out. I will not give them the option: to take the earthiness out of this article would be to gut it clean.
A faint mist has followed me around Montreal for two days,enveloping the length and breadth of my body like a cold, dank cloak. Clothes, after being exposed to the unseasonable chill, to the semi-liquid air, feel like pin-pricks of ice against my skin, uncomfortably crystalline. The overcast afternoons possess an evening-quality, bringing a night-sense with them, hours before the sun sets. My wanderings have been weather-truncated, are temporarily limited to the near-environs of the hotel. In the few ripe hours of my days, I have become intimately acquainted with a lovely stationers, the gift shop of the Museum of Archaeology & History, and a thimble-sized tea-room. For 3 days, I have gamely resisted purchasing dainty sheets of paper and pinned butterflies, throwing all of my sensual indulgence into downing small, steaming cups of Lady Grey tea.
My rainy-day uniform, so pointedly girl-columnist chic, is relaxing fire-side, where I tossed it immediately after closing my door: mint-green tam, purple galoshes, khaki trench-coat. I wish that I could regale you with the romanticisms of a raging wood-fire and pungent smoke, the sharpened dagger-point of a No. 2 pencil and a lined moleskine, a chipped glass and a bottle of Scotch. Instead, I have been tapping away, dictating my thoughts straight into this electric beast, no booze, no paper, no bonhomie.
I am trying to live up to the dreamy, intellectual writer's notions that are always fermenting in the depths of my brain, somewhere between imagination and reality. I discovered, practically as soon as my feet hit the Canadian ground, that it is just as time-consuming here as it was at home. I get bored with the whole endeavour rather quickly. If I truly had the stuff to play a continual game of dress-up, I would be an actor, not a writer. I can dream bursting Technicolor dreams of being Edna St. Vincent Millay, but the living of it is proving tedious.
Yet it is because of Edna St. V of M that I am here, in this foreign-familiar place, attempting to be a writer of fascinating dimensions. She was sent to Paris in 1920 to write for an American publication, a girl-abroad for the very first time. Not even a girl, really, but a woman, fancy-free, digging her heels in, refusing to take-on grown-up responsibility. When you live that wildly, perhaps you do not need to be an adult. Whoever she was--however she was--she was asked to write mildly ridiculous things, to write below herself, to infuse the mundane with her particular genius-disease of vivid, intellectual snarkiness and beautiful syntax: whereas I am probably being asked to write above myself, to learn and sweat my way into some kind of superior capability that someone else believes I possess. Because I, too, live wildly, love words, and wish to sit at some foreign table-side listening to the crazy world flow by, I took this job.
I have, thus far, been forced to shun tables and sidewalks, parks and walkways, due to this damnable weather. I get dressed, circle between the neighborhood shops, and take too much tea. I take tea to go, drinking the hot liquid as I stalk the aisles of that Stationers, lightly thumbing striped paper, dotted paper, floral paper. I take tea in, sitting at a different beaten-up table every time. I doodle things in my notebooks, write stubs of sentences, phrases, descriptives: I find it hard to write in earnest with so many staring eyes, lest I come off as a poseur, someone with nothing better to do than sit idly in a tea-shop writing unimportant,hollow things. My professional attitude is not quite invincible; too many people sit in public writing in notebooks or tapping away on laptops.
Until the weather breaks, clears and rises again, I have many empty hours to fill, many hours to be spent indoors recovering from the mist, getting warm. I expected to be driven indoors for a great Montreal winter, in a few months' time when snow drifts pile up man-high. Instead, I have a blazing electric fire. It lacks ambiance but its heat is potent enough to hit the backs of my thighs, the small of my back, my buttocks, as I stand across the room at the full-length windows. They are street-level, flush with the passers-by,the kind that you can open wide and walk-through, into another world. I push the green velvet black-out curtains aside, winding the fabric across my breasts, my stomach, my hips.
In the gloaming, my eyes alight on the inky-wet pavement, glowing street-lights, and sea of slowly-moving people. When I am awake, this street is never empty, its sounds never dull to anything lower than a murmur or buzz. I am staring out at a moving swirl of people, naked behind the curtain. I wonder how many people see me, if they are focusing on anything but what is at their feet. I am bereft of clothes due to laziness, due to the same mid-evening inertia that has beset the tourists outside my windows. I let the curtain fall, and I realize something.
I turn towards the reading light, towards the radiant warmth of the fireplace that allowed me to remove the coat, hat, boots and, for a few moments, my sense of professional obligation. I cannot, of course, sight-see in inclement weather. I cannot become acquainted with the wider-wonders of Montreal. I cannot write ecstatic articles about places that I have not yet seen. I can ,however, let loose my empathy for the everyday; casting my net lightly across these quaint neighborhood streets, I have been able, for fleeting moments, to glimpse its beating heart.
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