Plus Ca Change, Plus C'est la Même Chose

 

I rush over meadows and dance between trees, turning faces, ruffling clothing as I pass by. The people of my beautiful city of Paris don’t know how much I love them, and they don’t know how much I hate to see them hate me. I am the wind. The wind of story-books and pirate tales, and I am that of shipwrecks and torn houses. However, now that it’s winter, I don’t want to destroy. I’m fascinated by the way the city I love hates me, and how, as soon as I thrive, they shrink away. Zooming down streets I realise it’s more than that, I’m fascinated by the ones who don’t hate me, those like the little girl I just passed by.

 

The young girl steps out of the doorway and breathes out steamed fire, her lava red coat shrouding the layers of fleece, thermal, polypropylene. She does not see the firelight in her eyes freeze to grey-blue as I rush around her. She can’t help but feel a sort of chill isolation in stepping out into an empty, just-day-broken street, her mind still on last night’s fire and gratin. Now, feeling my cold seep through her clothing cocoon, she breathes deeply. Sometimes winter can be the start of a metamorphosis, and sometimes it’s the end. The trees are losing leaves just as the sky is losing light, and just as this girl grows up and loses hope. Winter this year, is not an end or a beginning, it’s a continuation. It is the continuation of breathing, living and being, continuation of the continuous continuity that continues to batter the Parisian habitants as I do too. Buses feel this never-ending chill of winter, an infection that starts creeping into the girl in the red coat as soon as she steps on. Slow, gradual warmth seeps from between the rusty grates beneath the seats as the bus riders around her crease under the weight of the grey sky and cold air. They shrug and scrape out of the bus and along the street, flocking monochromatically from point A to point B. She skips off the bus onto the corner of the rue Saint Dominique, the fire she carries in her coat becoming speckled in the rain surrounded by grey, black, blue and brown. Her eye catches on a sparrow, slicing a silhouette through the stark sky.

 

My crisp wind whips through its wings, flowing around the tiny body like a river around a protruding rock. Somehow, sometimes time passes in a similar manner to a river, full of turmoil, power and haste. And sometimes, more like the Seine over which the little bird just flew, time feels like the slow sound of a bottle unstoppered or a drip of a tap not fully fastened, like morning light seeping through sheer curtains. He sweeps across the Parisian skyline, greys on greys. Perching on a power line, the bird watches the ant-like people trail along the cobblestone-lined streets, all counting their steps as they go. Their faces are downcast and furrowed, unlike the sparrow, who I pick up to set its course for its next destination. I carry him, weaving and fluttering, in, out and around corners, dodging cars, wings beating, he makes his way to his restaurant of choice; La Tour Eiffel. People munch and mumble around the queue to climb the famous landmark, a perfect hunting ground for crumbs. Pecking away at the Parisian delicacy, the sparrow jumps over a watch, smashed and stuck, ticking over and over between 11 and 12.

 

Winter is cold and shivering as this stomped on watch or an arrhythmic heart, and I see it more than any other. It is the frozen mind of the people of this time, their own ice age within them. I see their eyes glaze over as I sweep past. So frozen that they allow no clutter, no mess and no question to melt through. Blank expressions are stamped across the faces of the city characterised for its passion. But passion is now pushed aside like a glass out of place in a cabinet of columns and rows. They are scared of uncertainty, of questions; the static minds frozen still. The haze of the clouds that I cover the winter sky with shrouds the anxiety of that poor watch or sore heart. But onwards they walk and work and eat and sleep, following the veins of winter routine, ever changing, ever staying the same.

 

Mary Buchanan