Laughing & Snow

How you get into a life: by audacity. And breaking and entering sometimes.

That's what I was thinking, with my eyes stuck in the eyes of a close friend, a friend I had met recently and with whom time was losing all its importance.

He was returning from a trip to Finland. A long journey, since he even lived and worked there.

There he had set up a business, was successful and then bankrupt and ended up sleeping outside on the sidewalks.

He had retired for a while to a forest on the outskirts of Helsinki before meeting a fisherman who had pulled him out of the water.

Let's say: a fisherman who had re-trained him to consider himself, who had simply made him understand his value and that she was not resting in the success of his enterprises, nor in his head resting against the cold stones of the Finnish sidewalks.

He came back to France three months ago now.

We met one night to walk together.

He was looking for shoes - it was an excuse to see each other.

In the end, he couldn't find any, but we were still standing on top of it until noon.

He told me a lot about loneliness.

From what he had experienced in town and then in the forest, before meeting the fisherman.

A good man says to me.

The kind of person where everything is written in the eye: all the beauty of the world, everything in its place.

He told me about a night when he was in the forest, alone, a night when it was really cold and he was struggling with the thought of his suicide. He wanted to take action and lay bare among the trees and lay down.

To leave without feeling anything.

That's what I was thinking.
For real.
But you know at that moment (not right away, it came later, when the cold was so bad that I couldn't feel my bones) I understood something that made my heart serene, even if on the spot it was as painful as death.
Everything happens when you are alone, everything can be unlocked when you are alone, when you accept and respond within yourself to your own loneliness, when you look at yourself and you see only a huge emptiness and that from this emptiness comes out a great, a great...
I don't know about that. I don't know anything, actually.
What I am, what I want, what I care about.
And who am I?
And then a Great laugh, a laugh like the snow that comes to cover all this with silence.
You see, as low as the ground, the mouth among the snowflakes and without any recourse possible, that's where I lived and accepted this.
And I figured:
Oh, yeah, yeah.
All right, okay.
And that's not understanding, you live it, you feel it - that's not where it happens (he shows his head with his fingers).
It's not something you can juggle and be clever with, no, it's a feeling that leaves you speechless.
It is there, when you are alone, when you touch what seems to be the depths of your own solitude that you understand: I am not alone, I have never been alone.
And nothing can happen to me.
I dance like this, and nothing can happen to me.
It's not one: nothing can happen to me, so I'm going to throw myself out of a building, or I'm going to rob a bank or hold my breath to the ocean floor.
No, it's more like: nothing can happen to me and everything will happen to me.
Nothing will be spared me and everything will be freely consented to and accepted, with great devotion for my daily life, for everyday life.
For what I'm going through.
Everything I'm going through.
He finished his sentence and sighed.

And it was one of the first times in my life that I could say with a sigh that it was light, infinitely light.

Like a discreet offering to the winter wind.

We got up from the chairs where we were sitting, I listened to him, he was talking - and both of us were reliving this moment so close and so far away, this moment that he alone lived in a lost forest in Finland.

I forgot what we did after that.

We must have walked a long way, I think.

Then we said goodbye,

Without a word, and in a broad smile.