Snowflake

I got lost in a blue sky yesterday. I was sitting on a splintering bench covered in bird shit and black marker. I was eating my lunch, a pita stuffed with cheddar and salami. I looked up at the sky.

I wasn’t thinking about the perfect atmospheric conditions that created it. I wasn’t thinking about myself for once either, what I was doing or where I was going. The pita bread was resting on my lap, it was undisturbed too, bar a corner which had been nibbled at before the sky took hold.

It’s as though the birds had forgotten to fly, the clouds to float, the wind to blow, pilots to fly. It didn’t make any sense to me. Such a perfect, deep blue. I didn’t need to think about anything. I just had to look.

January has rolled into February, which is quickly turning into March. Another winter is slipping away. I will soon be another year older too but I can’t make this fact mean anything to me. Twenty-four seems as unremarkable an age as twenty-three. Time is a formless thing that envelopes us without any notice, without any warning.

I dream about you again, though it’s becoming a less frequent occurrence. This time you were more a silhouette than an actual person. We were in another country, the bus station had the same ornate signs as the Metro in Paris, only it wasn’t Paris. We weren’t there together but we were inhabiting the same space. We didn’t talk or acknowledge each other, yet there was an atmosphere between us and in the dream it was driving me mad. I felt so agitated that when I woke up I couldn’t shake it.

You were touring with a band that had a curfew, but I saw you sneak out. You went to the bus station with the metro signs and I decided to follow you and confront you. It seemed that I had to and when I found you I gave you a preachy sermon about how you didn’t have to live the way you were living — what I was really saying in a roundabout way was that you didn’t have to live without me.

You stared at me, not saying anything. Your eyes were dull, didn’t have the pleading look where they asked for sympathy in that cheeky, childlike way I was used to. It wasn’t what I expected and even my dream self-recognized this divide between expectation and reality and seemed thrown.

In fact you didn’t register a thing I said or respond at all. Complete silence. I kept talking but I soon realized I was talking to myself. That’s when I woke up and I thought about asking you if you’d like to get a coffee with me, but the dream had imprinted a very strong fear that you would be the exact same in reality, so I didn’t.

A headline recently grabbed my attention on a newsstand. Special little snowflake. It was about millennials. Social media. AI. Grade inflation. Youth unemployment. Corporate drones. Gen X losers. Special little snowflakes. Bred on participation trophies and the lie of fulfillment. The article said we’re all narcissists, we’re all doomed. The day was a wet, dense day. A heavy fog smothered the night as soon as the rain stopped. An elderly woman on the bus called it Sherlock Holmes weather. I silently agreed.

I find myself flicking through memories these days like they are index cards, searching for something, some fragment.

Coming back often to the memory of a trip to Paris. A full city, full of history, full of tall, elegant buildings with white shutters and tree-lined boulevards, even the trees old and grand, and how they made me think about the palm trees of Southern California, how they are dying and disappearing which seems strange given how enormous and juvenile they look.

Paris full of cafes with wicker chairs and tiny tables, on them resting tiny, expensive coffees. The people well-dressed, stoic, their indifferent bodies floating by.

I think about walking up the hill to Sacre Couer, how it stands like a sentry over the city, like a shepherd watching over its flock. The sky was wispy that day, clouds like the white, grey tip of a cigarette. Smudges of blue thrown in, though they were quickly disappearing. From my perch I watched the weather changing over the city. I knew then that rain clouds would shroud Paris for the afternoon. No one seemed to care.

Cities refuse to dwell. Always on to the next moment like a beating drum. It is no use to fight it. There’s reassurance to be found in this, if you have the strength to look for it.

My views, my perceptions, moments in time. Allusive feelings that escape us but leave a distinguishable stamp, the same way a cut leaves a faint scar that sometimes disappears completely, sometimes linger.

We must remember I tell myself, it has to matter. Blank canvases are only an idea to sell self-help books. Life is like a sudden rogue wave that no one can explain but that is merciless in sweeping whatever lies in its path along with it.

I resolve to be grateful for this. To not fight the current. To follow it to wherever it may bring me.