These Dreams of You

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I must seem like a panhandler, another homeless beggar, she thinks, and then realizes that in fact at this moment that’s exactly what she is. In the Gare du Nord she feels herself under the surveillance of patrolling police as though she’s wandered over from Pigalle to ply her trade. Her hair has grown out but still has streaks of a pale blue that faded back in that room at the center of Addis Ababa.

In the light of the sun coming through the station’s skylight, Viv eats the rest of her baguette, drinks the rest of her juice and watches a single butterfly flutter out of the morning mist and steam off the railway tracks to the glass above. The butterfly has wandered into the station through an open door, or where the trains come and go, to spend the rest of its brief life amid the furor of people and machines in passage — and as Viv watches, she wants to shield it in armor. She wants to envelop it in one of the metal frames with which she surrounded her stainless-glass recreations back home, to honor and protect what’s all the more beautiful for its precariousness; but she can’t do that anymore. Someone took from her, carelessly, a singular and beautiful vision, in order to steal not only her past but her future.