Bordeaux

I'm in Bordeaux. The city looks very different. It looks bigger and cleaner than I remembered it. I had forgotten how snobbish this place is. I hadn't been back for so many years. And yet certain things haven't changed. In a café, I recognized faces from when I used to live here. Same café, same people, same groups of friends, just less hair, a little fatter... The beggars and the whores on Rue Sainte-Catherine are the same, just more grey hair and more hanging tits. Well they survived at least and you can start talking about vocation after so many years! They must have thought the same when they saw me. Especially the part about the hanging tits... Does it ever happen to you that you leave a place for many years and you think that everything stopped when you left it? That people ended up in a frozen frame and stayed like this forever? You become so self-centered that you think everyone disappeared with you? When I used to live in Bordeaux, I was a lazy closet-case student who chose to come out through theater and cheap wine, skipping class, waking up at 3pm after too many beers and not the slightest anguish over my decadent life-style, smoking cigarettes in lieu of breakfast, roaming the café-terraces, playing theater and truly believing I would make it to Broadway... And here I am now, back many years later, for work. The outcloseted corporate geek is back in town. In a suit, too tight to fit his love-handles and too clean to remind himself that who he used to be. Is he happier now? Well, he did make it to Broadway on business trips, still smokes, still roams dodgy cafés, still has trouble waking up in the mornings and still plays theater at work, everyday, showing his ham tendencies to half-motivated audiences who never ask for autographs. Hm... while jogging down memory lane I realized that I too was a tart with hanging tits. PS: Why am I feeling so sorry for myself???