“Is it time to talk about stopping?”
She is watching you quietly, waiting for your answer.
Her question is a betrayal. She is supposed to be midwifing you safely to the other end, not making you worry that the pain might destroy you.
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What does a flower feel when it blossoms? Soft? Beautiful?
After being a seed, then a sprout, how does it feel to unfurl?
Nothing like the process that it took to get there.
— Your mother, on the phone last week
I was not here when Notre-Dame burned. I had already moved to Montreal. In the last snows of winter, I watched the flames lick her spire from a laptop as my own body was consumed by fires I hadn’t yet detected. I see a yellow crane hovering above the spot where I know the cathedral to be, where hundreds of experts are laying hands on her once-burned body. I am beyond the reach of restorers. Plumes of smoke still billow above my head…
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I am almost out of time in Paris. I keep my headset on and loop around back to the beginning of the museum, eager to see how big the crowds will have grown by the time I get back to the portico. It is when I am in the old drawing room, antique clocks and gold gilded moldings quivering in the firelight, that I start noticing the bleep bleep of walkie-talkies and the hushed exchanges of guards. My body registers this shift, mutating the space from museum to city building....
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