I’ve never been one to question my own mind as its gaps seem to have always been easy to trace back to excessive alcohol consumption or similarly induced bliss, without referring to drugs, as I have from the start fundamentally recognized my proneness to addiction and actively acted accordingly, like a rebellious renegade, in disagreement coloring inside his life’s lines to at all cost avoid an untimely end, yet allowing some deviations nevertheless.
Paying our respect to a Holy Wolf last weekend, immortalized in a small church on a hill, pretty close to the tiny village in the Dordogne region where I lived for a while with my sister a mere thirty years ago, like a tiger catching fire blossoming into the first theatre play I wrote solo, this is where I wanted to re-inaugurate Ivory in the convoyed memories of so many milestones reached, warranting it a personal heritage, so I arranged us a trip as a birthday gift, for him obviously but to good practice profiting from it myself as well.
This particular crusade made me realize just how artificial my recollections actually are, being instantly drawn to the fake flowers on its graveyard, long before following Ivory into the by now refurbished sanctuary itself, not unlike then, but with the knowledge of today probably drawn by the power of their pink.
That knowledge, I am quite relieved to say, has stood its test of time as it surprisingly turns out it was the same me after all, trying out a new direction back then, dipping my toes into a French life, accessible but foreign still.
Couldn’t I have anticipated all of this a little faster? Sure. But while I found myself ordering the last mulled wine at the bar tabac of my dreams, dressed up for the big reveal of Christmas coming to Monpazier, the bar that is, not me, I don’t dress up that easily anymore, watching them literally scrape the bottom of the barrel, I blamed puppyhood for all lost time since, along with a congenital eagerness to please others that has got me extendedly derailed.
Still in search of time lost since, much like the novel in seven volumes by French author Marcel Proust that I actually reread there then, it more or less felt like embracing a future me, and not that odd at all.
Happy holidays!
