In the grey cities — Towards the graveyard

Last night, I chose to wander aimlessly, letting my steps take me wherever they wished. I passed again through the little alley, hoping to catch sight once more of that illuminated veranda that had so enchanted me the night before — a five-sided glass veranda where a sweet little family was spending time together by the light of candles and small lamps. Something almost unbearably happy. But this time, the house was shrouded in darkness. No magic two nights in a row — or at least, not the same kind.

Tonight’s magic would be darker and stranger; I should have guessed it right from the start, in the previous street, where there was a shadowy garden behind a twisted fence, overrun with vegetation and brambles, with a few pale white roses floating above it all. I stopped in front of it and stared for a long time, not knowing exactly why it fascinated me. Farther on, having left that little neighborhood behind without regret, I took a street at random after the Town Hall — and there it was again, the same feeling. A small, decrepit house at the bottom of a steep street, with a deep black gate partly swallowed by vegetation. It obscured most of the house. I’ve always loved that kind of thing — that atmosphere of decay and age — I don’t know why.

I climbed the street and quickly realized I had never walked it before. The houses obsessed me, as they always do during my night walks, with their lit-up windows, so warm and inviting, making you feel all the more alone, and evoking something no doubt very primitive — the urge to knock on the door, just to get a little warmth and meet fellow humans. To take over their lives, too, their worlds — because a house is a world unto itself. Often, just the color of a wallpaper, a painting on the wall, the shape of a lamp, is enough to spark stories and fantasies. Every house is a novel.

The street opened onto the housing project. Across my entire field of view: small apartment blocks, lawns, paved paths, garages — a miniature world, perfectly organized, domesticated. I walked straight ahead, passing quiet teenagers and fathers with kids — no one paid me any attention. The orange, illuminated apartment blocks looked unreal.

In front of a beautiful house, I positioned myself with respect to the streetlamp and the branches above me to get the best light, the best framing. And once again, I realized I wasn’t seeing reality — I was seeing my fantasies, and I wasn’t approaching the real as real, but as aesthetic matter, a work just waiting to be captured by the press of a button.

Leaving the housing project, I was back in familiar territory; nothing stopped me from heading back down to the Town Hall, then home. But like in a dream, I saw paths and streets again, rising toward neighborhoods I hadn’t noticed before. I climbed a quiet street where nearly every house was dark. The sense of unreality grew stronger and peaked when I reached the cemetery. Its long wall closed off the street and blocked the horizon; above it, the moon — absolutely full, yellowish, enormous. The funeral home looked like a Roman building, and with its exotic plants out front, I felt more than ever as if I were on a set. Across the road, there were warehouses, then trees, then night.

I walked along the cemetery wall and took a small path beneath the branches that led to open fields — we were leaving the city. But another branch of the path led toward some abandoned military barracks, fenced off with barbed wire. The ground was muddy. The feeling of unreality gave way to other thoughts, more personal ones; old faces came back to me. A subtle shift in mood, step by step, as always during these walks — every corner, every architectural nuance, every faint change in lighting carries you into another inner world. I thought of Émilie Forest. I repeated her name like a mantra, or as if to give it back a bit of substance, a bit of flesh. I hadn’t thought of that name in years — it felt like it belonged to a past life. Émilie Forest: a waitress-in-training who had lived in the apartment across from mine when I was a young student, the first person I met there and spent time with for a few weeks before she simply vanished. I wondered if she was doing okay.

Note: Upon rereading this account of the walk, I thought of Béatrice and wondered why, since she never lived in that neighborhood — before realizing that today, it’s in the cemetery at the top of the hill where she lives now, or to be more exact, where her ashes lie. I now remember that I had given her this text to read, since we were talking about meditation — a practice she pursued diligently to keep the pain at bay — as far away as possible — on top of the multiple doses of ketamine she was taking daily, generally with little success. I argued that walking in a certain state of mind was akin to a form of meditation: moving forward without thinking, with an empty mind, fully open to perceptions on one hand, and to the spontaneous, uncontrolled images and thoughts rising within on the other.

Originally published at http://danslesvillesgrises.hautetfort.com on May 27, 2026.