just a place where I used to live
Once there was a little girl
Used to wonder what she would be
Went out into the big wide world
Now she's just a memory
Mark Knopfler - A Place Where We Used To Live
In a few days, I’ll find myself, once again, in Lyon.
When one looks up Lyon in agarit’s grand dictionary of Life, the Universe and Everything, one finds two entries:
Lyon [Lee- ON]
1) noun (geogr.) city in France. Important cultural and industrial center, capital of the Rhône-Alpes region. Home of the French figure skating couple Isabel Delobel - Olivier Schoenfelder.
2) memory six months of my life in 2010 that stand in such great contrast to my otherwise drab existence that I sometimes wonder if they ever actually took place.
I will visit the geographic location, the memory doesn't exist anywhere but in my head these days. Still, everything will be just as I remember it. The cathedral will stand where it stood. The view will be exactly the same. The voice in the metro will announce the stations just as it did in 2010 and the stations will not have changed. Part-Dieu - Place Guichard - Saxe Gambetta - Jean Macé - Place Jean Jaurès - Debourg. People will walk over Pont de la Guillotière as they always have done. I bet it will smell just the same too.
But I am a different person nowadays. And in any case, I will be merely a guest, a tourist there. It won’t be my cathedral, my metro, my Pont de la Guillotière. And when I leave Lyon a few days later, I will leave knowing that I am unlikely to voluntarily visit it ever again. I will have said good bye. The memory will be permanently archived next to Agarit’s fifth birthday or Agarit’s trip to England ´98 and any color the memory still has today will fade. Lyon will not be walks hand in hand or avocados for breakfast anymore. It will return to being a geographic location once again. A nice city to be sure, but one I am utterly done with.
And, cosmos willing, I will soon start making new memories elsewhere.
