Le Choix d'Être

September again.

The vine on the opposite wall had gone through its full year: the tentative March growth he had watched arrive, the full June abundance, the slow September turning that was not yet red but would be. The courtyard was the same courtyard. The light was the same light, or rather the light of the same season returning, which was not the same thing but was close enough to recognize.

He sat at the window with the cafetière and the notebook open to a new first page.

He had been sitting here eleven months ago with a blank notebook and forty-one abandoned pages and the specific quality of a person who had arrived somewhere without knowing why, who could point at things on a menu because he could not say their names. He had written, at the top of the first page: je ne suis pas chez moi.

He was chez lui now. This was simply true, the way things became true through the accumulation of days lived fully inside them rather than beside them.

The manuscript was with a publisher in Montreal, not sold but considered, which was the correct word for the stage it was in. Arsenault had sent it with a letter. Julien had not written another word of fiction since sending it. He had been reading instead, in French and in English, the two languages sitting beside each other in his reading the way they sat beside each other in his thinking now, each one illuminating the gaps in the other, the depth living between them.

The lessons had not ended so much as dissolved into something without a name or a schedule. He and Lumière still met, still talked, still moved through the language together, but the structure of teacher and student had been quietly set aside, the way scaffolding comes down when the building can stand on its own. She would say something in French that sent him to the dictionary. He would say something about the manuscript that sent her to a question she had not thought to ask. They sharpened each other, unhurriedly, in the manner of people who have discovered that genuine conversation is its own form of education and requires no syllabus.

He uncapped the pen. The notebook waited with the patience of blank pages.

He thought about the word être. The infinitive, the base form, the verb before it commits to a subject or a tense. To be. Not I am or she was or they will be, just the pure concept, the action held in its essential form, waiting to become particular.

The choice to be was not a single choice made once. He understood this now in a way he had not understood it when he arrived. It was the choice made again every morning: to inhabit rather than watch, to speak rather than point, to stay rather than flee, to receive the true thing when it was offered and to offer the true thing in return. It was not a destination. It was a practice. The present tense, sustained.

"On commence maintenant," the prologue had said. We begin now.

He was still beginning. That was not a failure. That was the point.

He wrote at the top of the new first page, in French, in the present tense, where he lived:

Je suis ici. Je choisis d'être.

I am here. I choose to be.

He looked at the sentence. It was not the first sentence of anything yet. It was simply true, which was enough.

He closed the notebook.

Outside, the September city was beginning its day with the unhurried certainty of a place that has done this before and will do it again. The tram on its schedule. The boulangerie opening. The Quantum Café receiving its first customers of the morning, Thomas at the machine, the physics-named menu on the wall, the corner table where it had all begun available and waiting.

He put on his jacket.

He went out into the morning.

Fin