A word spoken in the classroom and hidden there. Sealed tight. Along with abandoned, naive thoughts of youth.

The station, the train, the city that wakes up, the suburbs by the window, defying the small valleys and the plains, the fields and the villages.

Small houses recalling the time when clocks hung high on culminating bell towers of small, pretentious churches, like chains. There the train slips on its rails into a reassuring humming and seems to do nothing but cross this landscape, excusing itself from being there, going away, taking the bothersome nature of its whistling along with it.

The silence of eternity goes back into existence as the train fades away, its noises now barely audible. The sleeping countryside, offering itself to its inhabitants, lets its train caress its streets only at certain moments of the day. Always the same ones, each day.

It becomes part of the picture, this train devoid of passengers looking at the countryside that doesn’t look back.

It is the 10:30 a.m. train. Its few passengers will get off and venture through the scattering and deserted streets of the capitol. It’s cold. Some, the least courageous, will take their time sipping their coffee, or a hot chocolate, as they eavesdrop behind the pages of their newspapers.

The countryside wakes up and becomes this patient boy drinking coffee, these two friends of different ages, the older one teaching something to the younger, and those two girls laughing at infantile jokes as they pull their blond hair behind their tiny ears.

With the gestures of women who constantly speak, they sit down to talk about Jérémie (“he is so handsome, wearing his baddy pants or his grey sweatpants (…) and he is single too …). Still single at 15, the myth of being single in the megalopolis flies away without leaving trace.

Finally, the small coffee, the little glass, the little spoon, the little saucer, the little sip, the little bill.

And then the streets, the cold, nothing has changed.

The distances seem shorter from the train station to the river, from the river to the garden, from the garden to the central square, where people from the north cross paths with grey 1970s buildings from the south. From that time, only the taste of community still lingers, the taste of melancholy and humility, the taste of the city hotel, its fountain.

Did I also bear the youthful face of these high schoolers burying their hands inside the sleeves of their sweaters? Or, in the insistence of that moment in which I found myself so adult-like, such an expert on the taste of things, did I think I knew so much about life I had to prop all of its doors open?

All feels frail and tender. Jérémie frees his hands from his sleeves as he walks. Perhaps he smokes a cigarette in the bathroom of his high school. That bathroom, which thanks to such a grown up act, that ever so pure silliness, and the blossoming words marked on its walls, made me understand I wasn’t the only one who desired the touch of a man’s hands, the scent of a man’s body, the blessing of a man’s pleasure.

I desire a man more than Catherine, with her leather jacket and buttocks hanging out of her Levi’s. The boys stared at her as I stared back at them, the promises of lust that I would never inspire on them, with a leather jacket on or not.

If I could have been Catherine … as I was in the privacy of my parents’ bedroom. Washing my face afterwards, quickly and hard before they got back home, after those hours of solitary pleasure.

In a leap of faith, I eventually became friends with Catherine, who would never know or guess that our Adam was the same.

I think of the spectrum of my adolescence, which I don’t want to resurrect. The dreams of caresses, the beard of the red-headed French professor who one day referred to me as Rimbaud (but who is this mysterious Rimbaud guy?). And then he offered me “The flowers of evil,” the day before summer vacation: a revelation, the first one — a literary orgasm, the first one.

Mother singing Belgian songs, father walking around with the ashtray in hand, offering it to whoever happened to pass him by.

On the other hand, a pack of cigarettes against a lighter, and the daily newspaper — those red-colored headlines that I learned to read better upside down than normal. The same newspaper I buy nowadays, thinking we may be reading the same words, the same colors in the morning.

Today they have a dog. A fun, faithful dog, hairy and who tends to drool a lot. A dog who doesn’t bite, but who doesn’t hesitate to trample on the files scattered around in the search of a lost photograph. A word spoken in the classroom and hidden there. Sealed tight. Along with abandoned, naive thoughts of youth. A tiny little dog against the fantasy of my younger years, and mostly, silence.

Countryside fallen asleep. I haven’t forgotten you.

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